Spoiler alert: I am definitely for fostering acquisition over solely laboring through learning! So, what’s the difference? Well, learning is something you do very intentionally and through planned work and effort. It usually involves lessons or exercises, workout or practice, and demands a lot of rigor and studiousness. You can also say “learning” simply for the mission you are striving for: you are learning French. On the other hand, acquiring is what happens in you when a s

Like me, you may not really care to learn the words to be able to do complicated math in French, but you probably want to know enough vocab to function in the variety of situations that life puts you through. So here’s my advice on how to do it: diversity, diversity, diversity your exposure. To acquire words, we need to be exposed to them many times. But it’s not enough to simply repeat the same thing, we need to keep coming back to a word from different angles. If you’ve hea

So, I probably never told you, but I don’t really know how to do math in English. Oh yes, I would know how to count to a quadrillion upon my son’s request, but I certainly could not tell you any trigonometry term, and even though I was the best student in my math class for all my schooling, I don’t really have a clue what you’re all talking about when you say “calculus” and “algebra”. Do you know why that is? It’s because I have never taken a math class in the US! As simple a

In previous posts, I told you about the language acquisition curve during a full immersion experience, as well as about how I was fully convinced about acquiring languages through immersion at Normandale Elementary School in Minnesota. However, I feel I should go back a little further in my youth to tell you about where and when immersion made a lasting impression on me: Pennsylvania in 2006. I was 17 years old and my parents gave me the amazing opportunity to go live without

In my last post, I told you about the language acquisition curve during a full immersion experience like the ones organized by Deep French. I ended on the plateau effect participants typically get to, where speaking and understanding French may seem more tedious than in the middle of the experience, but where your proficiency has actually surpassed what it used to be. It’s time I tell you what happens after the plateau. I must say it was a pleasure for me to witness it in the

The language acquisition process undergone by the participants of the spring experience was very similar to the one I’ve observed throughout my career as a language educator (last experience but also in language immersion classrooms). It looked pretty much like this: Warm-up: participants kicked into gear and became more and more comfortable as they embraced the immersion in the first few days Take-off: starting on day 3 or so, participants were already a LOT more comfortable

Let me tell you a little bit about where I got fully convinced that hands-on immersion was the way to go. It was in Edina, Minnesota (U.S.A.). I spent one school year co-teaching at Normandale French Immersion Elementary School in 2009–2010. There was a team of well-established, permanent teachers, and I was part of another team, of co-teachers arrived straight from France (that team changed every year). What I witnessed at Normandale was A-MA-ZING. The students were all from