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Eh... I feel like this is way too strict. Arguably this would make immersion impossible these days, because the gateway to your native language is right there in your pocket, whether you live in a foreign country or not.
Learning by interacting with the natives, in any form. It can be talking to them, it can be reading books, or consuming their media. The more you do it, the more "immersed" you are.
gog is correct in the sense that's how they formally define "immersion" as a learning method. When a student enters the study environment (such as, the classroom), everyone will engage only in the target language, native speakers present or no. You are forced to join the conversation and other activities, feeling immense social pressure to get out any words, hopefully with some fluency lest you look like a dim-witted idiot. Actually travelling to foreign countries used to be even better, because not only you'd come across as dim and rude, you couldn't achieve anything. (And yes, today you have to artificially limit yourself to use your own brainpower instead of using translator tools nor give the natives another free lesson to practice their English.)
That's fair enough, I think I went too far by restricting it to natives. But check his other comment, apparently these schools put hardly any pressure on the students at all, no wonder they don't work!
Agreed, I think /u/gog is describing what happens when immersion meets lax schooling. And perhaps it is prone to encourage laxity. Vocabulary and grammar tests are "easy" to grade. Immersion-as-technically defined requires more work to grade to objectively, which is a great boon for teachers and schools that don't want to be harsh.
I suppose that for "immersion" to work at all as a classroom method, the classes need to be a bit nasty, which can be psychologically brutal for weak-willed. It doesn't work if the kids can just ignore the teacher or laugh at him/her. I remember the immersion classes I attended as quite stressful. Yet many implementers think of it as a nice cuddly alternative to vocabulary tests, whereas it should be anything but. If you have not done your vocabulary homework, you will be embarrassed for the 5 minutes the teacher has time to question you. If you come to immersion class unprepared, you'd be embarrassed for the whole lesson.
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