I analyse discourses/practices of a camp offering an immersive English experience to teenagers following Swiss mainstream education. Drawing on an on-going ethnography, I highlight contradictory ideologies with regard to the immersive setting centred around flown-in native speakers and accentuate social inequalities related to the selective education system in multilingual Switzerland.
Immersion is often believed to allow “soaking up the language like a sponge” and associated with the requirement of being around “natives” guaranteeing the learners the best possible input. This contribution proposes an analysis of the discourse of/practices in a one-week camp offering an immersive English experience to teenagers following mainstream education in multilingual Switzerland. Rather than going abroad, English “natives” are flown in promising an immersion-like situation. The paper seeks to investigate 1) what sort of (language) ideologies are made use of and 2) what missions resonate in the practices observed. Drawing on an on-going collection of material (website, reports, interviews with initiators, organisers, funding partners and teenagers), I demonstrate which discursive elements are put forward when promoting the camp and the idea of immersion and how these ideas are translated (or not) into practices. First, I argue that language competences as well as “anglophone” activities (traditions, folklore, traditional sports etc) cultivated in the immersive camp are outlined as a step towards a successful professional future, which is said to become more and more international. Despite this international significance associated with the English language, monolingual ideologies dominate the discourse on immersion and lead to stereotypical practices in the camp. Second, I illustrate that the “teachers” flown in are selected on the basis of their degree of authentic “nativeness”. In the camp, they are forced to erase (language) practices incompatible with a stereotypical image of native speakers of English. Finally, I question the celebratory discourse on English immersion on the one hand, and the unequal access to the highest level of Swiss education on the other hand, forcing the majority of the teenagers to privilege the language(s) dominant in their territory over English.
