The Research
An immersion education has been researched and documented for years by now. As known, when one is around the age of five, the language that they are trying to get down is their first language, not a foreign or second language. Thus, at the beginning of the immersion program it has shown that English speakers experience a sufficient delay of learning the literacy and skills. By the fourth, fifth and sixth grades, however, researchers have discovered that immersion students are right back up to their expected knowledge in their first language (most commonly English). Although courses taught at Cesar Chavez are taught in Spanish, children in this immersion program end up mastering all academic material and are up to the level of all knowledge of the subjects of the other students their grade level who are not in a structured immersion program or any immersion program, in that matter. It has also shown that the schooling in a second language/ Spanish immersion Program: • Increases the students IQ • Increases the students divergent thinking, that is, a way of measuring one’s so called “cognitive flexibility” also known as flexibility of the mind and its thinking. • Makes it much more easier for the person learning the second language to learn even a third or fourth language. They have noticed it is much easier to understand the relationships between words and their meanings when one has that background of a second language learned at a young age. • Students are more likely to be positive and tolerant to others who are both or either culturally or linguistically different.
One of the unique factors of Cesar Chavez is that their Spanish immersion program is suitable for all children, and the fact that all children of special needs, below achieving or different family situations will develop and learn just as well as they would if they were placed in a purely English speaking school.
Read more about this topic: Cesar Chavez Elementary School
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