Achievement test scores for 417 fifth graders in both school settings indicated superior language achievement by the 164 immersion centre students. Questionnaire data from 94 teachers and administrators provided reasons for these differences. Implied that programs should focus on maximum use of French and meeting teachers' materials and resources…

Evaluates the writing of Hispanic students in bilingual and submersion programs, comparing it with the writing of native English speakers in regular programs. Five dependent variables are evaluated: rhetorical effectiveness, overall quality of writing, productivity, syntactic maturity, and error frequency. (46 references) (Author/OD)

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)…

Saskatchewan French immersion high school graduates were asked what influence that experience had on career/college choice, maintenance and/or improvement of French skills, self-assessment of French capabilities, assessment of and suggestions for the program, leisure time use of French, and placement of their own children in the program. Results…

A study used classroom observation in a two-way Spanish immersion kindergarten to identify aspects of the classroom environment that permitted and promoted participation by the English-speaking children despite their limited Spanish proficiency. Two participation structures were analyzed: teacher-directed lessons and child-centered activities.…

Describes a field experience project where students traveled to the Concordia Language Villages, Moorhead, Minnesota, for a one-day conference. Prior to the conference students researched school systems in other countries and assumed the roles of representatives. They then worked towards a consensus for an ideal school. (MJP)

Summarizes a study on block scheduling for second-language programs among Canadian middle school students. Results show that students studying French on a block schedule (e.g., one-half day instruction over a 10-week period) performed better on standardized tests than did control students who received standard 40-minute per day French instruction.…

This article presents data from two yearlong ethnographic studies of the biliteracy instruction and development of young Latina/o children in two counter-hegemonic English immersion classes in the English-only milieu established by California's Proposition 227. The author first describes the struggle that the teachers engaged in as they sought to…

There are many untested, long-held assumptions within the field of study abroad concerning the impact of program elements such as study duration, language of instruction, program models, and student housing choices. One assumption embraced within the field is that direct enrollment (or full immersion) programs are more effective at achieving a…

This article is the second part of a report on research that examined immersion language teachers' strategies to modify their speech in order to maintain use of the target language. As described in the first part in "Babel," Volume 40, Number 2 (Veque, 2005), this classroom-based research, undertaken at Methodist Ladies College (MLC) in…

This report describes a program that was designed to end the isolation typically experienced by language minority students in traditional bilingual education and to provide language majority students the opportunity to acquire proficiency in a second Language. The program served 4 classes of approximately 22 students each (85 students) in…

Since the mid-1980s two-way bilingual education programs have attracted renewed interest as an effective way to educate both language-minority and language-majority students. This report, which describes and assesses the current state of such programs in the United States, is based on data collected from 169 schools during the 1991-92, 1992-93,…

This paper discusses the use of American Sign Language (ASL) in an English-as-a-Second-Language approach to teaching reading and writing skills to deaf students. The paper poses and answers the following theoretical and practical questions: (1) What is the nature of first language reading? (2) What is the nature of second language reading? (3)…

Six papers on interlanguage are presented. The first, "Language Transfer," experimentally tests Robert Lado's contrastive analysis principles on the transfer of language skills to second language acquisition. The second paper, called "Interlanguage," builds on this work in discussing the structured nature of interlanguage and…

A study of self-correction, or repair (the righting of the trouble source) among bilingual secondary students differed from most repair studies in three ways. It: (1) examined results in the form of description rather than in quantifiable analyses; (2) defined errors as trouble sources (hearable errors, breaks in communication such as word…