This study aims to investigate the role of mediation in the learning process from a sociocultural perspective, activity theory in particular. This study was carried out in a primary English immersion school within the CCUEI Programs in Mainland China. Data were collected mainly through observations and interviews, which were then supplemented by…

Grounded in sociocultural theory, this study uses an ecological approach to examine how student interactions within a dual-language school context may offer affordances for increased linguistic and conceptual understanding. Using qualitative analysis of student discourse, this paper focuses on data from recorded interactions between pairs of…

The 23rd EUROCALL conference was held in Cyprus from the 24th to the 27th of August 2016. The theme of the conference this year was "CALL Communities and Culture." It offered a unique opportunity to hear from real-world CALL practitioners on how they practice CALL in their communities, and how the CALL culture has developed in local and…

This study investigated the ways in which family members of students in a Hawaiian language immersion program were involved in their children's education and identified the effects of and barriers to involvement. A sociocultural theoretical approach and Epstein's framework of different types of involvement were applied. Participants included 35…

This article describes the Language Center Montessori School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where students are learning in a language-immersion Montessori environment. The school offers a choice to parents--Spanish immersion or French immersion--but Montessori comes with both. The school's motivation for promoting bilingualism is to improve…

Proficiency in a second language (L2) may depend upon the age of exposure and the continued use of the mother tongue (L1) during L2 acquisition. The effect of early L2 exposure on the preattentive perception of native and non-native vowel contrasts was studied by measuring the mismatch negativity (MMN) response from 14-year-old children. The test…

In immersion programs, language is not directly taught, but rather embedded into the content of a lesson. The target language is the medium of the lesson, not the object of the instruction. A story provides a language experience and encourages students to participate actively in the lesson. Children are also more apt to learn and retain ideas and…

Research concerning the success factors in language immersion education is reviewed, focusing on five major schools of thought. First, the traditional model for immersion research, implemented in a Montreal (Canada) suburb is examined. Then three studies of the influence of affective variables in immersion program success are examined, and it is…

This guide contains daily lesson plans for a 4-week, 4-hour a day immersion program for an introductory German-as-a-foreign-language program. The program uses repetition, gestures, realia, puppets, and comprehension-based activities such as Total Physical Response; it also uses illustrations designed to promote the goals of comprehension,…

This collection of 16 papers covers theoretical issues and research on interlanguage development and second language acquisition variables. Among the specific topics addressed are: morpheme group interactions, acquisition of complex sentences in English as a second language, uniformity in interlanguage development, Spanish-English basilang,…

Guidelines are provided for teacher-librarians organizing bilingual school resource centers at British Columbia schools with French immersion programs. The guidelines address (1) the handling of French language materials within the collection; (2) selection and acquisition; (3) selection of vertical file materials; (4) budgeting, cataloguing, and…

A study indicates that students in French immersion programs in Canadian schools achieve superior progress in French and equal skill in English relative to students in partial immersion classes or traditional second-language study. (CK)

Conceptual guidelines for the design of new secondary school French second language programs are outlined, in response to the need for an instructional model to accommodate Alberta's increasing anglophone enrollment in French immersion programs. The first section chronicles the evolution of the concept of language and second language instructional…

This report constitutes a synthesis of 10 years of research which was conducted to assist Ontario boards of education in implementing and evaluating French immersion programs in their jurisdictions. The immersion programs evaluated include three major alternatives: (1) the early total French immersion programs of the Carleton, Ottawa, and Toronto…

Seven essential components of an immersion teacher preparation program are proposed, based on an analysis of the immersion approach to second language teaching and analysis of a survey of 120 teachers using French as the language of instruction for the majority of the school day. (MSE)