Sixth International Conference on Immersion and Dual Language Education: Connecting Research and Practice Across Contexts

Paper/Best Practice Session (1 hour)

French

One-Way Second/Foreign Language Immersion

This presentation reports on the findings of a qualitative study exploring the influence of a two-year long episodic professional development intervention on fifteen Grade 6-12 French immersion teachers’ ability to design and implement well integrated content and language lessons.  Implications for professional development and future research will be discussed. 

Although immersion programs are very popular in Canada, they are complex to implement and not as successful as we would hope them to be when it comes to the development of students’ language skills, which are lacking when compared to their native counterparts as they exit high school. Research indicates that a major issue lies in the difficulty to create well-balanced programs where both content instruction and language/literacy instruction can be targeted simultaneously. Thus, the challenges linked to language development faced by students in immersion can be partly attributed to insufficient attention being paid to the teaching of language and literacy skills within the context of subject matter instruction.  This presentation will report on the findings of a qualitative study conducted within the context of an ongoing five-year grant funded project in Western Canada titled (We Integrate Language Development and Critical Thinking (WILDCAT). Its overarching goal is increased student achievement through targeted professional development (PD) interventions aimed at raising immersion teachers’ awareness of the importance of language instruction within the context of content teaching so that they can better develop content and language integrated lessons.  Specifically, this longitudinal study explores the influence of an episodic 20-day PD intervention over a two-year long period of time designed for fifteen participating grades 6-12 French immersion teachers. Data include co-constructed lesson plans, classroom observations using a lesson-study framework, and focus-group debriefing sessions. This presentation will report on the preliminary findings, which indicate that the type of episodic PD interventions specifically designed for the WILDACT project and provided over a long period of time can have a positive effect on teachers’ ability to counterbalance instruction and that the lesson-study framework provides valuable support to such PD interventions.  The presentation will also outline some important lessons learned during the PD process.