THE 20 YEARS OF A SYSTEMATIC APPROACH TO STATE LANGUAGE LEARNING IN ESTONIA: THE JOURNEY OF THE LANGUAGE IMMERSION PROGRAM

The state language of the Republic of Estonia is the Estonian language, with all the official procedures, documentation and paperwork conducted in the state language. At the state level there are requirements to the state language proficiency for employment: for instance the education sector requires the state language proficiency at the level from B2 to C1. At the same time the Russian-speaking minority in Estonia comprises about 30% of the population. In Estonia there are Estonian-medium and Russian-medium kindergartens and basic schools, education at the upper-secondary school level is Estonian-medium either fully or partially (taking up 60% of the instructional time). Due to the complicated situation with the Estonian language proficiency of alumni of the Russian-medium schools at the end of the 1990s, the Ministry of Education and Research made a decision to launch the language immersion program in November 1998. That decision was the beginning of the wholesale and systematic approach to Estonian language teaching and learning, which was, and still is, based on the needs of society. The first forms of the total early language immersion were opened in 2000, followed by late language immersion classrooms. The Language Immersion Centre that deals with coordination and methodological development of the program was opened also in 2000. The first kindergarten groups of total early language immersion were opened in 2003. The success of the total early language immersion model lay in a number of factors: it was a state program from the very beginning, it was thoroughly planned and prepared and it had a clear social message of integration. The program developed and underwent changes responding to updates in the needs of society: to address parents’ concerns for the development of the children’s mother tongue and to cope with the lack of teaching, the partial language immersion model was launched in kindergartens in 2008; the two-way language immersion model was introduced at the preschool level in 2015 to offer all children, both Estonian and Russian speakers, equal access to possibilities for early multilingualism and to respond to the recent changes in the labour market that indicated the growing need for Russian language proficiency. There is also a growing interest towards language immersion from the side of the Estonian-medium school, which recognizes the immersion experience as valuable in the situation of working with children from families of refugees and asylum seekers. Thus the future seems to be the multilingual school using the best of immersion and CLIL methodology and experience.