A student's View on immersion

by Alessandro Cimino, 5th grade at "Manzoni" school - Bolzano/Bozen
(Translated from Italian)

These days we are being submerged with speeches by politicians, teachers, headmasters and parents on experimental language-teaching models in South Tyrol, particularly on language immersion. Those who have had some experience of it argue either against or in favour of it.

Who else would know better than we, who have experienced it personally for some years? But has anyone ever asked for our opinion?

We started with copresence at the "Manzoni" school in 1993, when we were in 3rd form. We started with a subject called "social studies". In this subject we study history, geography, the tradition and the administration of South Tyrol. We got to know our region better and learnt to love it. Our two teachers, of Italian and German mother tongue, teach the same subject and alternate using the two languages very spontaneously as though they were the one and the same language. And we learnt to talk to them in their mother tongue, be it German or Italian.

The German teacher, in particular, explained various aspects of traditional Tyrolean lifestyle: typical names of places, which can hardly be translated or traditional customs. we had two lessons on Tyrolean cuisine and talked about cakes, wines, cheese, bacon and meat. We read about language minorities in Italy and about the Ladins* minority in South Tyrol in particular. We read some texts in that language and compared them to the other two.

The copresence lesson on the Paris Treaty was particularly interesting as we learnt about its role in the life of the three ethnic groups in our region.

Lately we have discussed the local administration, the parties and the administrative vocabulary in German. Then we met the head of the local government (Presidente della Giunta Provinciale / Landeshauptmann) Mr. Durnwalder and visited the seat of the regional government in Trento. Further we made two excursions: one with the children of our German partner school "Pestalozzi" to the Val d'Ultimo (Ultental), the other one to Fiè (Völs) where we met with the students of a local German school.

We worked a lot, speaking and writing in both languages, but there were neither great problems nor fears, also because our German teacher always tolerated our inevitable mistakes! None of us would want "social studies" to be taught differently, neither would we ever think that it could.

We have also copresence in other subjects: geography and music. The method is the same. In geography we have studied the town of Bolzano and its districts, in particular the one we live in: "Novacella", but also the historic centre of the town and the double name of the streets.

Some parts of general geography is done in German too; and we think, that thanks to the very fact that our two teachers alternate often switching the language, we even have some fun in this rather boring subject!

When we had music, we learnt to read notes in two languages and .... wow! the music coming from our instruments is always the same! This proves, that we can understand music even if it is written in two different languages. Not to mention all the little songs, which are typical of the German culture, we have listened to, learnt and sung!

Together with the children of our German partner school we did a bilingual play at Christmas, with costumes, sceneries and a choir! Maybe it wasn't quite like "Hamlet", but we had great fun (our teachers probably did not, as they had to cope with 70 children!)

Even tests are often bilingual and if we make mistakes, it is not because we do not understand, but because we did not study!

After three years of copresence this method has become natural to us. Each one of us speaks German, some better, some worse. Thanks to our good teachers we are not afraid. Through the study of history, tradition and culture we have been taught to respect the members of the other linguistic group. And after all, German is fun, if you learn it when studying other subjects and we learn many words, sentences and idioms.


Even if our opinion is little valued we have the right to know, why learning with this method, which we enjoy and which works well, cannot be continued in the future.

* There are three official languages in South Tyrol: Italian, German and Ladins.