Beyond the Immersion Revolution: Meeting Ongoing Challenges

Tina Hickey
Associate Professor, University College Dublin, Ireland

Immersion faces a number of significant challenges which are shared across a wide range of models and contexts. Here I explore some of these current challenges, drawing particularly on research dealing with immersion programs in heritage languages. Addressing the diversity of language and learning needs found in some immersion models requires not only effective teacher education, but also examination of teacher and parent beliefs. Supporting parents in becoming active educational partners in immersion is challenging but worthwhile, even when parents have low proficiency in the target language. Finally, it is important to look beyond the classroom and consider how target language use can be promoted outside the immersion setting, and the link between language and identity.

Tina Hickey is Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology, University College Dublin. Her research interests are first language acquisition, early second language acquisition, immersion education, minority language maintenance, and reading in a second language. She is a current board-member of the Journal of Immersion and Content Based Language Education, the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and an Executive Committee member and former Treasurer of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL). She was a Government of Ireland Research Fellow (2007-08) and a member of COST Bi-SLI (IS084, 2011-2014). She has published books and articles on immersion education and her most recent book, co-edited with Anne-Marie de Mejia, is: Immersion Education in the Early Years: A Special Issue (Routledge).