Sharing 18 Years Experience with Language Immersion in a Japanese K-12 School - Insights and Implications

Mike Botswick

Mike Botswick, original designer and director of Katoh Gakuen in Numazu City, Shizuoka Prefecture, spoke about his school’s immersion program. Katoh Gakuen is the oldest and most successful immersion program in Japan. It has Japanese students being exposed to English in learning basic subjects from kindergarten through high school, roughly half or more of each school day. Mr. Botswick showed us how the view that introducing English too early may damage children’s development of their native language (in this case, Japanese) is false. He said not a single study has evidence of this – around the world. On the contrary, thousands of studies show that children’s native language development is the same or better than other children who are not exposed to a foreign language early. He showed films of first grade children doing math problems by arranging English word cards to form an appropriate question and then answer it, and of high school students debating in English. There were a wide range of questions from the audience and people left with a desire to learn more about immersion education.