Immigrants outperform Canadian-born groups in French immersion: examining factors that influence their achievement

Abstract

This paper examines the French achievement results of three groups of students: Canadian-born English/French bilingual, Canadian-born multilingual and immigrant multilingual Grade 6 French immersion students, by investigating how the variables of integrative and instrumental motivations, attitudes to the learning situation, French language anxiety, motivation to learn French and oral, receptive and written willingness to communicate affect their achievement in French. Different from research with immigrant communities learning a minority language outside of Canada, this research corroborates other Canadian research where the immigrant group outperforms the Canadian-born groups in French achievement. Subsequent ANOVAs and post-hoc tests on questionnaire data showed the multilingual immigrant group to have higher integrative and instrumental motivations and were more willing to speak in French. Of these variables, integrative motivation, willingness to communicate (reading and writing) and attitude to the learning situation predicted the test results. Memberships in the Canadian-born groups were associated with negative results.