Does anyone know of research about the difference between language immersion as a program within a school and language immersion as a whole school program?
Dear Michelle Haj-Broussard,
Immersion education is distinguished from two-way or dual- language education by the fact that for the majority of children, teaching is in their second language. By comparison, in duallanguage programmes the two languages in which teaching is conducted are each the first language of approximately half of the children enrolled in the programmes. Immersion programmes, therefore, are specifically designed to educate majority children in a second language which they have generally had no contact with prior to entering the school system.
Probably the best known of the immersion programmes are those which were introduced into Canada in the late 1970s with the goal of promoting bilingualism. However, immersion programmes can now be found in many countries across the world, including Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, the US and Spain (Johnstone 2001). Bostwick (2001) provides an account of an English immersion programme in Japan (and Kanagy 2001 reports on a Japanese immersion programme in Oregon in the US).
These programmes were designed for English-speaking children to enable them to attend schools in which they would receive the majority of their education through the medium of French. The aim is for the children to develop bilingualism as well as biliteracy in both English and French. There are various different approaches taken within immersion models. These include early (kindergarten) immersion, and late (year 5 or 6) immersion. While some programmes involve total immersion, others use partial immersion.
Programmes which begin early tend to adopt a total immersion
approach in the second language for the first two to three years. Mid-way through primary school the children’s first language is reintroduced and used for teaching some content subjects. An important aspect of immersion programmes, and one which distinguishes them from the submersion programmes discussed above, is that in such programmes there is overt support for the first language of the children, and this is generally achieved through bilingual teachers. This is a crucial aspect of the immersion programme, which is designed to ensure that additive, as opposed to subtractive, bilingualism is the result.
A report by Allen (2004) on reading levels in Canadian schools revealed that fifteen-year-old English-speaking students enrolled in French immersion programmes outperformed students enrolled in non-immersion programmes in almost all provinces when tested in English. However, other factors may have contributed to this result. For example, girls comprised 60 per cent of the enrolments in immersion programmes and have been found to outperform boys in reading more broadly in reading assessments, and students enrolled in the immersion programmes tended to come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds in general, and hence the findings probably cannot be solely attributed to immersion education.
The following file can hopefully provide you with the targeted literature in this regard.-->(pp.87-91).
Best of luck with your research,
Ali Bahadoran
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