Immersion-learning is definitely the best on average, even as it usually works faster for learning to understand a language than to speak it. But I would definitely not suggest that boarding school is ever the best way to go about that. Kids can be socially cruel, especially when it comes to someone who comes across as being very different in some way, is socially isolated and lacks the social protection necessary to become a secure and confident learner in the environment.
Originally Posted by
Toshbaf
Maybe because girls can get attention and talk a lot to boys and other girls?
How about boarding school? I think that is too high a price to pay to leave family just to learn a language.
With regard to the first question above: not likely, as the language-acquisition dynamic is also seen among women from backgrounds where women tend to be way less likely to mingle socially with a lot of men from beyond their own immediate family circle.
With regard to your second question: If you are asking if single-sex boarding schools improve foreign language development more than mixed-sex boarding schools, I would say it doesn't seem to be a major factor. There are some that say that girls' response to academic exposure in girls-only schools is better than in mixed gender schools. In my own family, the women and friends who went to all-girls schools/all-girl sections of schools seem to be more verbally assertive on average in serious discussions than their siblings who didn't, but I wouldn't mix that kind of thing with being a function of whether or not the attended school was single-sex or mixed. And for them, it's definitely not a language issue.
