Academic self-concept (ASC) is a student's self-perceived level of ability in an academic domain and a major factor involved in academic performance. We examined the importance of internal/external sources of evaluation for the structure of L2 and L3 ASCs in two groups of 5th/6th graders learning English and French in Switzerland (mean age: 12.1).…

Within educational research, there has been an increased interest in recent years to develop learners' language awareness (LA) in the context of plurilingual education. Recommendations and intentions are given pointing to the benefits, but there are few concrete tools for how it can be carried out in practice. The article seeks to contribute to…

This case study investigated the practiced language policies of a French elementary school educator, Catherine, as she implemented the French National Cycle of instruction for the early elementary grades with a culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) class of students. The findings revealed that macro-level policies--such as curriculum and…

This study investigated the systematic and principled teaching of foreign language (FL) literacy in two young learner classrooms in England. Over the course of 23 weeks, two classes of 9-11 year olds (N = 45) learned spoken and written language through an integrated pedagogy. The underpinning rationale was to explore principled ways of teaching FL…

This study examines the interaction between African immigrant students and their mainstream teachers. I am particularly interested in the influence of classroom practices on the literacy development of Francophone African immigrant children in the U.S. classroom. The student participants in this study (two French speaking African students) were…

This article recounts three studies that portray an evolution from research examining the effects of researcher-designed instructional interventions to research examining the impact of helping teachers to design their own instructional interventions. Study 1 investigated the effects of an instructional treatment designed by the research team on…

In teaching French as a foreign language, there is a constant development from traditional methods to action-oriented approaches. This development has arisen as a result of students' needs and of innovations in technology. Particularly in the last decade, there has been increasing interest in teaching foreign languages to children. Because of…

This paper looks at reading in French immersion and how learning French is seen more as a skill rather than a social practice that could be examined through a more critical lens. Most of the teachers often teach students how to read but rarely will they discuss the role of French in Canadian society and how this is manifested in the texts they…

This study compares the frequency and distribution of different types of corrective feedback (CF) (recasts, prompts and explicit correction) and learner uptake in 43 hours of classroom interaction at the 4th-5th grade level across three instructional settings: (1) two content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classrooms in Spain with English…

This study examined metalinguistic awareness in children who were becoming bilingual in an immersion education program. The purpose was to determine at what point in emerging bilingualism the previously reported metalinguistic advantages appear and what types of metalinguistic tasks reveal these developmental differences. Participants were 124…

In this article, I examine French language instruction in an elementary classroom serving primarily children of Afro-French immigrants in Paris. I show that a prevalent French language ideology privileges written over oral expression and associates full mastery of written French with rational thought and full inclusion in the French polity. This…

Anglophone children in Grades 2 and 5 who attended an intensive French immersion program were examined for linguistic and metalinguistic ability in English and French. Measures of linguistic proficiency (vocabulary and grammatical knowledge) were consistently higher in English and remained so even after 5 years of immersion education in French.…

The present study investigated the development of linguistic awareness in children exposed to the early learning of a second language in Grades 3-5 of primary school, i.e. between the ages of 8 and 10. The aim was to determine whether this bilingual experience enhanced the development of phonological awareness in beginning readers in a bilingual…

This study is part of a larger investigation of the usefulness of instruction designed to raise cross-linguistic awareness in young Francophone learners of English in Quebec. In the research reported here, the focus is on cognates. Since previous research shows that learners typically fail to recognise many helpful similarities between words in a…

This study is an investigation of the extent to which francophone learners of English as a second language (ESL) are aware of the differences between French and English question formation and how such awareness relates to their L2 performance. Three tasks were administered to 58 grades 5 and 6 francophone ESL learners. In a grammaticality…