Full Immersion
From The ICAL TEFL wiki
Full Immersion is a strategy for teaching English to students. Essentially the students are given input in English only which means that the teacher does not speak any other language other than English. It is a very effective method of teaching but can take some time before the students are confident enough to produce (i.e. speak/write) English.
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Background
This method is based on the way a native speaker learns English as a child. They are surrounded by English input (people speaking to them, radio and television, etc) and slowly they will begin to speak. At 6 months or so they will be making sounds, at 12 months they will use single words, at 2 years they will have a vocabulary or 150 - 300 words and then gradually they will begin using grammar correctly as they get older.
This general principle is brought into the classroom with several important differences.
Practicalities
In the classroom the teacher will speak English only. With beginners they will need to give a lot of simple, repetative input.
There is also a strong use of visuals: flash cards and the like.
Because the students have their mother tongue to fall back on, they will begin to learn a lot quicker than native speaker children. That is, it will not take them 12 months before they produce their first word! At the end of the first lesson, using gestures, repetition and visuals, a typical class could easily be saying things like:
And so on.
Full Immersion
Ideally, if this method is adopted by a school it should be used everywhere. All teachers and staff should be encouraged to speak English only but allow students (especially beginners) to use their MT when they need to. For example, a student might ask to use the toilet in their MT but the teacher would respond in English.
English Only
The idea that the students' mother tongue is not used at all can sometimes be a little intimindating to the new teacher. However, with the right lesson preparation and specific, defined long-term goals, it can be achieved.
Plus, it is very rare that a student will not know some English words even though they may not think they do! For example, if you go into the class and hold up these flash cards the chances are that the students mother tongue will use very similar words to the English original:
This can act as an anchor for the students to let them know they're not learning completely from scratch!
