What is the process by which a child learns a second language?
As with the acquisition of the mother tongue, first language or home language, a child first understands the language and then later learns to speak it by being surrounded by it. After some time at IST, the child will have a strong passive (or unspoken) vocabulary in the immersion language; s/he will understand most of what the teacher says, but may not be able to respond in that language (the “silent phase”). The second stage of language-learning, active oral expression, occurs as the child becomes comfortable verbally expressing and pronouncing the immersion language, and as the vocabulary and syntax of the language develop, the child will firstly read and then write in the new immersion language. Over an extended period of time, all of the above phases of language development will be fully integrated with the child.
