The most experienced language teachers know that learning is best when it’s perfectly tailored to each student. Rosetta Stone for Schools can help educators deliver each student customized curricula with immediate feedback to accelerate their language learning and retention.
In addition to real-time feedback, student data reporting, and supplemental teacher resources, the structured immersion-based lessons from Rosetta Stone support educators in creating effective classroom language learning programs for English learners and world language programs.
What is structured immersion?
Students of all ages learn and retain language more quickly using structured immersion because it’s intuitive, mirroring the natural way children first acquire languages.
With structured immersion, new words and phrases are reinforced as students encounter them in real-world contexts using audio from native speakers, images, and text.
Why structured immersion works
Children don’t typically acquire their native language (or languages) by studying verb conjugation tables or memorizing vocabulary flashcards. Instead, they form associations between words and images and develop grammatical skills using context clues and reasoning. Structured immersion emulates this natural approach to language acquisition, building students’ vocabulary and grammar from a single word to full conversations.
From the first Rosetta Stone lesson, students are immersed in their target language. Lessons are crafted to help students intuitively learn through native speakers and images. Scaffolded lessons guide students to build upon the vocabulary and language knowledge they have learned in previous lessons. This approach to language learning results in fast acquisition and longer-term retention for success in the classroom and beyond.
How can structured immersion help make classroom learning more effective?
Rosetta Stone for Schools’ powerful platform offers a number of features that work with structured immersion to provide students with an individualized curriculum and support educators in teaching students with diverse needs.
Structured immersion across four domains of language
Each student has their own strengths and weaknesses within sub-skills of second language acquisition. For example, imagine a student with great reading skills and poor pronunciation. They look forward to reading comprehension tests but flounder when asked to read aloud. Providing them with challenging reading and addressing specific shortcomings in her pronunciation both sound perfectly reasonable.
Rosetta Stone for Schools engages students in immersive activities across all four domains of language–reading, writing, speaking, and listening. As students move through immersive lessons entirely in their target language, they are engaging in each domain to strengthen their skills.
Rosetta Stone for Schools delivers an easy-to-use interface and customizations. Educators can select a curriculum to student learning time on specific practice areas.
Structured immersion improves conversational skills
Most language teachers would agree that all students could use more practice with extemporaneous conversation. One-on-one conversation is the gold standard for improving pronunciation, conversational skills, and listening comprehension all at once. However, time constraints and class sizes can limit how much time educators can spend conversing with each student.
A common alternative in language classrooms is pairing students for conversation practice. However, this approach can pose its own challenges. Do mistakes by one student rub off on the other? How effective is conversation for pairs with discrepancies in skill level? How can teachers guarantee that students stay on task and in the target language?
Rosetta Stone offers conversational practice with the immediate feedback of TruAccent speech recognition. TruAccent speech recognition, which compares their voice to the voices of millions of native speakers, provides immediate feedback on pronunciation, even highlighting mispronounced words and identifying pauses. TruAccent is also one of the only speech engines that offers specific support for children’s voices, making it a great tool for language learners of all ages.
Immersive conversational activities in Rosetta Stone for Schools require students to provide spoken answers with correct vocabulary and pronunciation. TruAccent will ask the students to repeat themselves until they respond correctly and clearly. These conversational activities alone combine listening, speaking, and pronunciation practice in the target language all at once, coupled with speech recognition and providing feedback just as an experienced language teacher would.
Rosetta Stone provides a range of language learning activities in an immersive environment with real-time feedback. All in all, structured immersion through conversation practice helps classroom language learning become more effective. Providing individualized attention to each student’s weak points and supporting their strong suits benefits all students, from the most advanced ready for a challenge to the least advanced seeking support.
How does Rosetta Stone speed up and enhance classroom language teaching?
The benefits of integrating Rosetta Stone in the classroom aren’t limited to just students’ learning. The structured immersion method used in Rosetta Stone for Schools also benefits teachers and their teaching processes.
Rosetta Stone keeps class moving
In a traditional language classroom setting, teachers balance leading the entire class through the material while providing individual attention to students who need specific support or interventions. With Rosetta Stone for Schools, students can work independently through their assigned units as a progress bar tracks their correct and incorrect responses. Their mispronunciations and grammatical errors are corrected immediately to provide a chance to practice the correct response while helping them avoid those mistakes in the future.
Real-time feedback means students’ common errors get addressed and resolved quickly and more effectively as a part of the language acquisition process. This allows teachers to focus class instructional time on more complicated concepts or engaging activities rather than small-scale corrections. This feedback helps students improve while allowing teachers to focus their instruction effectively for everyone involved.
Usage Reports help teachers keep tabs and simplify grading
Rosetta Stone for Schools provides teachers with tools to manage their students’ progress with less effort easily. Each student’s progress bar is compiled and aggregated into a Usage Report viewable to teachers and administrators.
Usage Reports show that one student needs to complete a unit outside of class to catch up while another should try a different activity so as not to get ahead. Usage Reports also display the percent of correct and incorrect answers per activity. If an instructor finds that a particular story or speaking activity challenged the whole class, then they may choose to devote classroom time to reviewing it.
Teachers can even have students use the Milestone activities in Rosetta Stone as pre-assessments and/or tests to assess their improvement over the course of the unit. These results are recorded in the teacher reporting tools.
Such detailed, quantitative information helps teachers make instructional time more productive, relevant, and engaging to their specific class.
Rosetta Stone offers additional immersive materials
Beyond hours of immersive activities and educator reporting tools, Rosetta Stone also offers teacher resources for some world languages: tests, workbooks, and answer keys are easy to access and perfectly correspond with the platform’s units, levels, and lessons. These ready-to-use resources support classroom language teachers with learning activities and materials beyond the Rosetta Stone platform.
With our immersive curriculum and teacher materials, Rosetta Stone for Schools makes it easy to implement language learning in any K-12 classroom for both English language learners and world language students.
Rosetta Stone’s structured immersion integrates digital learning with the best of immersive language learning wrapped up in an easy-to-use platform, enabling students of any age to learn languages naturally. Offered in 25 world languages, including English, educators with Rosetta Stones for Schools can provide instruction online or offline, on desktop or mobile devices. Contact us to learn more about Rosetta Stone for Schools licenses for your students.
