French Immersion Pedagogy and Second-Language Acquisition
This domain tests whether you can name the mechanisms of second-language acquisition and, more importantly, turn them into classroom decisions in a PEI French immersion program: what to correct, when, how, and why.
The research base you must be able to cite
- Krashen: comprehensible input and the affective filter - anxiety and low motivation block uptake.
- Swain: the output hypothesis. Immersion students comprehend well but plateau in accuracy because they are rarely pushed to produce precise language; pushed output forces syntactic processing.
- Long: negotiation of meaning during interaction drives acquisition.
- Cummins: BICS in roughly two years, CALP in five to seven; the common underlying proficiency means literacy skills transfer across languages.
- Lyster and Ranta: six feedback moves - recast, explicit correction, clarification request, metalinguistic clue, elicitation, repetition. The last four (prompts) push self-repair more effectively than recasts in immersion classrooms.
Program architecture on PEI
Early French immersion (entry at Grade 1, roughly 90% French in the primary years, tapering toward half by the intermediate grades), late immersion (entry at Grade 7 with an intensive French phase), Intensive French at Grade 5 for core French students, and core French itself. Distinct from all of these are the French first-language schools of the Commission scolaire de langue française, whose students are Francophone; that is not immersion and should not be described as a variant of it.
Classroom principles
- French is the medium of instruction, not merely the subject.
- Comprehension precedes production: visuals, gestures, realia, paraphrase, repetition.
- Errors are developmental evidence of interlanguage; plan focused attention to form rather than hunting every error.
- Counterbalance content and language: shift the spotlight deliberately between meaning and form.
Worked example
A Grade 3 science class discussing plant parts drifts into English. Reasoning and steps: do not simply say en français. Identify the missing language (Je pense que… parce que…, la tige, les racines), teach and post the frame, rehearse it orally, then structure a task that requires it - an information gap or assigned group roles. When a student says "I think the roots drink water", respond with elicitation (Comment le dis-tu en français?) rather than a recast, because the goal is pushed production.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating immersion as exposure: assuming more French hours alone raises accuracy.
- Correcting every error, raising the affective filter and reducing talk.
- Expecting native-like French; immersion outcomes show predictable gaps in verb morphology and pronouns.
- Confusing late immersion's intensive entry with early immersion's long, gradual exposure.