Canadian Immersion Research Articles

Canadian Immersion and Adult Second Language Teaching: What's the Connection?

Canadian Immersion and Adult Second Language Teaching: What's the Connection?

The Applicability of the Immersion Approach to College Foreign Language Instruction

ABSTRACT The immersion approach to second language teaching differs from conventional skills‐based instruction in that in immersion the target language is used primarily as a vehicle for teaching other subjects in the school curriculum. Extensive evaluation has shown that immersion students, when compared to students in traditional language courses, develop higher levels of language skills and more positive attitudes towards language study. While the results of the Canadian immersion program have already led to the creation of similar programs in over a dozen school districts in the United States, its impact on the design of college foreign language instruction has yet to be felt. This paper argues that the research on immersion and subject‐matter teaching indicates this approach to be both a feasible and desirable alternative to traditional skills‐based instruction for college foreign language programs.

Designing bilingual education: Aspects of immersion and ‘European school’ models

This paper is a unique example of a comparison of achievement in second language learning as produced by two fundamentally different models of bilingual education. Canadian immersion programmes, designed primarily for language enrichment, and European School bilingual education, designed primarily for language maintenance, both promote French as a second language using totally different strategies. Test results revealed how such diversified approaches lead to highly comparable achievement scores, highlighting not the superiority of one model over the other but rather the role of the environment and the opportunity to use the target language as decisive factors in determining the nature of the model and the amount of target language input required in school.

Immersion Education à l'Américaine: A Descriptive Study of U.S. Immersion Programs

ABSTRACT: Since the early 1970's, immersion education has become an increasingly popular vehicle in the United States for achieving functional competency in a second language. Borrowed from our Canadian neighbors, immersion education is characterized by teaching the school curriculum entirely in a second language in the first two years of the program, and gradually introducing instruction in the native language in the third year, until it represents fifty percent of the instructional language by grade six. Directors of U.S. immersion programs have adopted the Canadian immersion education concept and have simultaneously adapted the concept to meet the needs and objectives of their particular instructional settings. The following article presents an overview of fourteen immersion education programs in this country. The seven categories which comprise the framework of this descriptive study are: 1) Program Origin; 2) Program Format; 3) Program Articulation; 4) Student Backgrounds; 5) Program Funding; 6) Factors Contributing to Program Success, and 7) Research Results.

Language Proficiency, Biliteracy and French Immersion

The impact of Canadian French immersion research on theoretical conceptions of bilingualism and biliteracy is reviewed and four major issues on which immersion research has had a significant impact are identified. These are: (1) the effects of bilingualism on children's cognitive and academic development; (2) the effects of intensity of school exposure to the second language (L2) on children's L1 and L2 development; (3) the optimal age issue in L2 learning; and (4) the suitability of a home-school language switch for all children. Contrary to many earlier assumptions, Canadian immersion research findings suggest that: (1) cognitive advantages may accrue to children who develop high levels of bilingual skills; (2) amount of instructional time through the minority language is generally related to achievement in that language but unrelated to achievement in the majority language; (3) older learners make more rapid progress than younger learners in acquiring L2 cognitive and academic skills; and (4) there is no evidence that immersion programs are unsuitable for any identifiable category of students. These findings are interpreted in the light of a theoretical framework for examining the relationships between language proficiency, bilingualism and academic achievement.

Community reaction to French instruction

Contrary to the impression one might receive from the newspapers, French language programs are not being thrust on the protesting or mildly acquiescing families of school aged children. The iniative for the first Canadian immersion classes, starting around 1965, came not from the government, and not from educational administrators, but fromparents. These parent-initiated experiments in Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, and Vancouver were successful, and even today immersion classes are often created as a direct result of formal petitions made to boards by parent groups. A remarkable, but little publicized, outgrowth or such initiative was the founding in 1977 of Canadian Parents for French, a national association of parents who want the best possible French language learning opportunities for Canadian children. One might note that every group opposed to French manages to get an article in the newspaper, but a group like Canadian Parents for French, which supports French, seems to be treated like a national secret. The organization shares information with its 5000 members about how to get French classes started and how to keep them going, what funding is available for them, what makes them successful, and how children can use their French outside the classroom. Members support teachers, administrators and trustees responsible for the programs. They express the interests of the association to representatives of the federal and provincial governments. Canadian Parents for French was created because people needed to have an organization through which Canadians could support all types of French language learning. In addition to promoting French in the school curriculum, this includes promoting opportunities to use French in the community by encouraging French story hours at the library, French scout groups, joint activities with francophone groups, and French summer camps and student exchanges. The strength of Canadian Parents for French attests to parental enthusiasm for French in the schools and especially for immersion classes. In these classes students are clearly learning to speak, read, and understand French far beyond the level achieved by most of their parents with no detrimental effects to the development of their English language skills and with the completion of a full elementary school curriculum.