Literature+Review

This is a 2010 Handbook for FI Administrators, published by the Ministry of Education in Alberta. Of the 7 chapters outlining the program, the chapter of greatest interest and relevance was Chapter 2, entitled **//Conditions for Educational Success//**, which summarizes 40 years of research into French Immersion programming. The following recommended teaching strategies highlight the need for a high degree of STUDENT involvement, interaction and accountability in their language learning:
 * the spontaneous and frequent use of French by **//students//** in **//teacher-student//** and **//student-student//** interactions
 * the use of authentic multimedia resources
 * active listening, spontaneous speaking and oral feedback
 * the use of music and videos
 * development and enrichment of oral expression
 * encouraging students to speak French, and corrects mistakes through repetition and role modelling;

Ellis, Rod. (1996) __The Study of Second Language Acquisition__. Classroom interaction and second language acquisition. pp. 565-610.
In this article,from the book __The Study of Second Language Acquisition,__ the author talks about how students acquire a Second Language (L2). Overall, the author concluded that the following interactions have been proven to improve L2 acquisition:

1. Having a chance to negotiate meaning. 2. Encouraging learners to reword what they have said to make it more grammatically correct. 3. Teacher-controled discourse leds to improved formal language skills, student-lead discourse leads to more improved oral skills. 4. Teacher talk needs to be tailored to students' level. 5. Listening to other students speak may help students more than actually speaking themselves.

Cummins- Millenuim Article

This article reviews and summaries some of the research done on Second Language Immersion in the past 30 years. It talks about how the culture in Immersion classrooms has been very teacher focuses as the teacher is the keeper of the language used in the classroom. For this reason French immersion student's receptive skills are superior to their productive skills in French. It also focuses on additive bilingualism and how teachers can use what students already know in their L1 while learning in their L2.



This Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat publication "What Works? Research Into Practice" discusses the importance of early intervention in either English or French at the phonemic level for at risk SK and early Grade 1 FI readers.

In this article, Cummins asserts that bilingual and immersion programs should embrace both the L1 and the L2 (or in the case of FI the TL). He encourages authentic forms of bilingualism, such as sister classes and creating bilingual multi-media projects to be shared on the web.

This article outlines two principles that describe the benefits of FI programs: 1. The Additive Bilingualism Enrichment Principle states that FI students incur subtle metalinguistic, academic and intellectual benefits. 2. The Linguistic Interdependence Principle states that the development of L2 language proficiency (whether the L1 and L2 languages are very similar or very different) somehow confers language proficiency in the student’s L1 language as well. Essentially, it transfers cognitive/academic or literacy-related skills across languages.

Despite these benefits, there exists is a highly problematic area within the FI programs. FI students’ receptive skills are highly developed but they have __inaccurate French production skills__(anecdotally found to be true by many FI teachers, including myself). Much of the poor production skills are attributed to highly teacher-centered or "transmission-oriented” classrooms in which students have minimal opportunities to use oral or written French for creative or problem-solving activities. FI teachers don’t often implement these “higher order thinking” opportunities because of concerns that students will use English. The result is pedagogy that is less cognitively challenging and creative. This promotes literal, rather than critical, comprehension.

The author makes a number of recommendations to promote simultaneous linguistic development AND content mastery, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of simplified, less-challenging learning opportunities.

Among the author’s many suggestions, the one that seemed relevant to my Action Research Project was the following:


 * Creative use of technology as a "cultural amplifier" (e.g. research using CD-ROM encyclopedias or the World Wide Web, word processing and data analysis programs to produce reports of project work, sister class networking with distant classes in pursuit of non-trivial bilingual projects, use of video cameras to create video "texts" for real audiences, etc.)

This article is a retrospective of the French Immersion program in Canada. It outlines the developmental stages that students should achieve by certain points in their academic career. The year of publication is unknown.

The following is a description of the progression of French language proficiency that students should achieve through the primary grades.

“In Grade 1, they will start using French to communicate their needs, ask questions and to describe their world. By Grade 2, with a greater vocabulary base and new expressions, they start to use more complex structures.” “By the time the children complete Primary, speaking, reading and writing both French and English are natural parts of their school life. They have acquired a variety of grammatical forms. They can read, interpret and answer questions about audio, visual or written material in French or in English. They are on their way to being bilingual.”



This article compares Early immersion (EI), Middle immersion (MI), and Late immersion (LI) programs. The researchers examined the proficiency of students in each of these programs in the areas of oral and written, input and output. Interestingly, they found that the only area that showed a significant advantage for EI students was in the area of the oral production. The researchers also found that, although adult learners learn language more quickly, child starters end up with better skills in the long run. It is suggested that one reason for the late of difference is that older children and adults already have an understanding of languages and how they work and are therefore able to learn more quickly.

[|Technology and Second Language Teaching] This article begins by giving a short retrospective of the technologies that have been employed in second language learning over the last 3-4 decades, within the context of 3 different language teaching methods: The Grammar Translation, The Audio-Lingual, and The Communicative. The second part of the article reviews the kinds of technologies used in 3 different second language learning contexts. The example that seemed most relevant was that of a first year Japanese language course at an American college. The teacher’s goal was to design activities that supported learner “use” of the target language. The teacher found that her use of online activities fostered increased opportunities for interaction within a single class. This “allowed students to better notice the input from others' messages and incorporate that input into their own messages, thus expanding opportunities for learning of new linguistic chunks.” This is exactly the kind of interaction I hope to foster using Voicethread.

This is a blog entitled **//Blogging About the Web 2.0.//** This particular entry was about why using Voicethread can be such a powerful tool in the classroom. The first thing the author states is the following: " I think collaboration and reflection are 2 of the biggest skills that kids need but aren't really getting enough of." The author goes on to list a number of ways you could use Voicethread to address this need for collaboration and reflection, and points us to other resources for learning about and using Voicethread.
 * @http://blog.web20classroom.org/2012/05/soyou-wanna-use-voicethread.html **

I'm going to make an assessment of this blog as one worth following. First off, Brenda posted it to our Diigo group only 3 days after it was posted on-line. This tells me she probably follows this author. In addition, I found a comment by a French teacher in Toronto named Sylvia Duckworth. She is at the forefront of many of the second language teaching movements in the last 10 years, and is someone worth following as a second language teacher. She even posted some of the Voicethreads that her students created this year.