French Immersion instruction has often focused on the development of oral language as the primary method of early literacy learning. Manitoba Education endorses this focus with its curricular emphasis on oral language acquisition before formal reading and writing instruction. This article examines the role of early years French immersion teachers…

This paper sets out to show how a trilingual teaching sequence delivered primarily in minority L2 Basque can foster not just development of oral presentation skills in Basque, but also in L1 Spanish and L3 English. We set out to show that such a trilingual teaching intervention, based on the principles of integrated teaching of languages and…

Purpose: This study aims to document the impact of an 80-h virtual Spanish language immersion program on four elementary school leaders in Kentucky. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a mixed methods approach. Each subject participated in three semi-structured interviews with the researcher and a standardized oral language assessment.…

This study reveals hitherto overlooked effects of age of onset (AO) in immersive school contexts, using multiple measures over time so as to focus on fluctuations and trends in individual data. The second language (L2) English development was studied in 91 children who received 50-50 content and language integrated learning (CLIL) instruction in…

Spanish-English emergent bilingual children's range of sociocultural and linguistic knowledge have typically gone devalued in relation to school literacy curricula. This case study examines how emergent bilingual children in a second grade one-way immersion dual language classroom draw on their prior cultural-experiential knowledge and dynamic…

Elementary French immersion (FI) language arts teachers often organize instruction around small learning groups. Students rotate through learning stations/centres and work independently with their peers on L2 literacy skills. This study examined how principles of task-based language teaching (TBLT) can be used and/or adapted to further support…

This study examined seven Louisiana kindergarten immersion teachers' practices to evaluate students' oral target language production and compare the oral production elicited when different instructional practices were used over a single semester. Three rounds of three 20-minute observations in three different contexts--circle time, direct…

The assessment of dual language immersion (DLI) students' proficiency in the partner language plays a key role in program evaluation. This article reports findings from a large-scale study, drawing on cross-sectional assessment data from 73 schools and longitudinal data from 25 schools. Students were tested in the interpretive (listening and…

In the present day Mandarin Chinese has become a commonly taught language in the U.S. Mandarin is widely taught in colleges and universities; K-12 Chinese programs, including immersion programs, have also grown rapidly. However, to date little research has been conducted on the latter programs. This study examines immersion programs in elementary…

The current study examines English-speaking learners of Spanish and their pragmatic development of request forms during a six-week immersion program in Madrid, Spain. Elicited production and intuition data were analyzed, focusing on personal deictic orientation, directness evidenced by clause type, and the use of "por favor"…

This paper assesses the efficiency of the "Language Immersion e-Course" developed at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Language Centre. The new self-study revision e-course, promoting students' proficiency in spoken and aural Russian through autonomous learning, is based on the Michel Thomas method, and is…

This volume is a collection of selected refereed papers presented at the Association of Teachers of Japanese Annual Spring Conference held at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in March of 2011. It not only covers several important topics on teaching and learning spoken and written Japanese and culture in and beyond classroom settings, but also…

Standardized tests have been selected as a key assessment factor in expanding the academic achievement of the national student population. However, these tests position immigrant students at the risk of academic failure, leading education experts to search for new strategies and teaching models. The "Handbook of Research on Assessment…

This quantitative, causal-comparative study examined the possible cause and effect relationship between educational programming, specifically one-way Spanish immersion and traditional English-only, and native English-speaking fifth graders' vocabulary and reading comprehension. Archival data was used to examine students' reading achievement as…

This article reports analysis of data collected from a quasi-experimental study in 2 Canadian late French immersion science classes. We examine if, how, and when the first language (L1) is used when students in the first years of their second language learning talk about complex science concepts. We compare differences in groups following a…