Compares two different types of bilingual education programs--the Canadian immersion programs, designed primarily for foreign language enrichment, and the European School bilingual education program, designed primarily for language maintenance. Achievement scores for both approaches were comparable, pointing to the importance of environment and…

This article documents the importance of collaborative dialogue as part of the process of second language learning. The stimulus for the dialogue we discuss in this article was a reformulation of a story written collaboratively in French by Nina and Dara, two adolescent French immersion students. A sociocultural theoretical perspective informs the…

A comparison of the French proficiency of bilingual and monolingual native English, Italian, or non-Romance language speaking eighth graders in an Ontario bilingual program found that the bilingual students generally performed better than monolingual students on cloze procedure tests and story telling tasks. (40 references) (Author/CB)

A review of the research on Canadian immersion programs supports two notions regarding second language learning: (1) older learners may have as much learning success as younger learners, and in a shorter time period; and (2) integration of content teaching and language teaching is paramount in effective second language instruction. (29 references)…

This paper presents the findings of the last completed evaluation of a partial immersion program in St. Thomas, Ontario, which involves the use of French as the medium of instruction for half the school day and English for the other half, beginning in Grade One. Unlike the previous evaluation, in the current one a Canadian-normed instrument was…

Several research and evaluation studies completed in bilingual education programs for language minority children in Canada are presented to support the claim that heritage, or first, language (HL) literacy plays an important role in the acquisition of a third language. A study completed by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education…