Browsing by Author "Verronen, Saara"

Objectives. The purpose of this study is to examine the benefits that Swedish immersion programme has brought to former students who have gone through the immersion programme. The benefits are examined from two angles that are the effectiveness of the language learning method and learning foreign languages. The aim is to get a good picture of the effectiveness of the language learning method from the answers of former immersion students. Methods. The study group consisted of 6 former immersion student. They were 25–26 years old. All of them had gone through the early total immersion programme in Vaasa. The data was collected during February and March in 2015 in a theme interview using a half structured interviewing method. The theme interview consisted of two themes that were based on the research questions. The interviews were held separately and the time of each interview were agreed with the interviewees. The data were analyzed using content analysis. Results and discussion. The immersion programme was felt to be a effective, natural and a good way to learn foreign languages. The main characters of the learning method were learning by speaking, learning by playing, one adult one language -strategy and the intensiveness of the method. The results show that the immersion programme is an effective way to learn foreign languages. The results show that especially learning English were experienced to be learnt easier because of the immersion programme. Two thirds of the interviewees experienced it easier to learn other languages as well especially languages related to Swedish. Learning the mother tongue was experienced to get weaker instead. On the other hand half of the interviewees didn’t experience any effects on learning their mother tongue.