Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2014

Bilingual education and second language immersion programs have operated on the premise that the bilingual student’s two languages should be kept rigidly separate. This paper argues that although it is appropriate to maintain largely separate spaces for each language, it is also important to teach for transfer across languages. In other words, it is useful to explore bilingual instructional strategies for teaching emergent bilingual students rather than assuming that monolingual instructional strategies are inherently superior. The central rationale for integration across languages is that learning efficiencies can be achieved when teachers explicitly draw their pupils’ attention to similarities and differences between their languages and reinforce effective learning strategies in a coordinated way across languages. The paper explores the interplay between bilingual and monolingual instructional strategies within French immersion programs, and bilingual education more generally, and suggests concrete strategies for optimizing students’ bilingual and biliteracy development.

This study investigates the role of teaching, context, and repetition in the acquisition of specialized vocabulary. It involves thirteen students enrolled in a French immersion class linked to a French adjunct language course at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Based on Webb’s (2008) classification, the researchers have examined and rated the contexts in which students were exposed to a sample of thirty words in their immersion course (lectures and readings). Of these, some (n = 22) were taught explicitly over the semester and others (n = 8) were not taught, as they were words students encountered incidentally in their readings or lectures. Results in this study showed that: a) incidental exposure did not lead to vocabulary acquisition regardless of clarity of context and number of exposures, and b) explicit teaching led to differential learning outcomes not fully explained by clarity of context or number of exposures. The study concludes with a discussion of other factors affecting vocabulary learning in the immersion adjunct context.

This paper presents an analysis of the lexical profile of the written assignments completed by a group of young CLIL learners. Participants in the study were attending 4th grade of Primary and had received around 714 hours of exposure to English. Results revealed lexical profiles which are characteristic of young learners of foreign languages with high frequency words being the most common. We also observed that learners show frequent instances of phonetic rendering, but little L1 influence for borrowings and relexifications. This can be a sign of the typical oral approach in CLIL classrooms. The young age, low proficiency, and short CLIL experience of the learners are taken into account in the interpretation of the findings. CLIL instruction revealed a positive effect on the initial development of lexical competence. The paper closes with a section that includes some suggestions for how to enhance lexical development within CLIL tuition.

The official need for content teachers to teach the language features of their fields has never been greater in Australia than now. In 2012, the recently formed national curriculum board announced that all teachers are responsible for the English language development of students whose first language or dialect is not Standard Australian English (SAE). This formal endorsement is an important juncture regarding the way expertise might be developed, perceived and exchanged between content and language teachers through collaboration, in order for the goals of English language learners in content areas to be realised. To that end, we conducted an action research project to explore and extend the reading strategies pedagogy of one English language teacher who teaches English language learners in a parallel junior high school Geography program. Such pedagogy will be valuable for all teachers as they seek to contribute to English language development goals as outlined in national curricula.

Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma has enacted a revitalization plan to promote Cherokee language in a variety of settings, and many tribal citizens have begun to confront how language factors into their identities as Cherokees. In particular, Tsalagi Dideloquasdi, the Cherokee immersion school, has become an important sociolinguistic site for the articulation of deeply seated beliefs and attitudes about issues such as the practicality of the language in contemporary times and who has a legitimate right to learn and speak the language. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate these attitudes and beliefs as well as the ideologies that inform them. Assuming a critical ethnographic stance, I examine the hegemonic discourses and structures that have led to the loss of Cherokee over generations as well as to three ideologies — impracticality, legitimacy, and hope — that influence the current efforts of the immersion school stakeholders.

This article describes qualitative findings from a mixed methods exploratory study of parental involvement in the heritage immersion context of Ireland. The research aimed to provide an in-depth analysis of the nature of home-school relations in this less usual educational setting. Three studies were designed in order to address this objective. Study 1 was a mixed methods investigation of the topic from the perspective of parents, involving a series of in-depth interviews and a self-report parental involvement survey. Study 2 was a qualitative exploration of educators’ experiences of parental involvement in an immersion setting. Study 3 was also qualitative in design and explored the topic at hand from the perspectives of immersion pupils. Findings indicated that there are distinct challenges to parental involvement in the context where the language of the home and the language of the school differ. Implications for practice in immersion schools are considered.