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

Laptop Poster Session for Graduate Students

Chinese

One-Way Second/Foreign Language Immersion

Elementary (K-5)

This study focuses on whether 5th grade Chinese immersion students benefit from morphological awareness instruction. Data analysis of pre-, post-, and delayed post-assessments show students in the experimental group outperforming those in the comparison group. Accuracy and complexity analysis shows intermediate level students benefit more than those in other levels.

A recent study focused on the effects of biliteracy instruction on Grade 2 French immersion students’ morphological awareness in French and English (Lyster, Quiroga & Ballinger, 2013). It demonstrated in general that students’ morphological awareness improved significantly as a result of the instructional intervention. The experimental group outperformed the comparison group in French and also in English when language dominance was accounted for. That is, the English-dominant students’ performance on tests in English was significantly better than their counterparts’ performance in the comparison group. Such results are quite promising, yet it is unclear whether we might expect similar results in studies conducted in contexts where the target language is not cognate with English (such as Chinese or Japanese). This study is a quasi-experimental, mixed methods classroom intervention study that investigated the effects of biliteracy instruction on Grade 5 Chinese immersion students’ morphological awareness. A pair of partner teachers (Chinese/English) co-designed with the researcher biliteracy tasks for one group of students. The tasks took place during instruction in Chinese and English and integrated a linguistic focus on compound words in an illustrated storybook used for social studies instruction. Before and after the intervention, these Grade 5 students (n=27) and a comparison group (n=26) were tested on parallel measures of morphological awareness, receptive vocabulary, and reading comprehension in both Chinese and English. Quantitative analyses (t-tests and correlations) on test results and qualitative methods (observations and interviews) were used to explore whether students’ morphological awareness improved as a result of the intervention. The study is currently in progress and results are not yet available, however complete findings will be shared at the presentation.