Researching Developing Discourses and Competences in Immersion Classrooms
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RESEARCHING DEVELOPING DISCOURSES AND COMPETENCES IN IMMERSION CLASSROOMS
INTRODUCTION
It has been more than 40 years since the beginning of the first experimental Canadian French Immersion programme in St Lambert, Montreal in 1965 and the initiation of research into this educational phenomenon. Today, there is a well established and well regarded research literature on immersion programmes, both in Canada and in other parts of the world. Indeed, as Stern acknowledged as long ago as 1984, immersion is probably one of the most thoroughly investigated educational innovations of all times. According to Baker (2001), there are now over 1,000 research studies on this type of educational provision. Although the term ‘immersion’ is frequently used in relation to the ‘dual’ or ‘two-way immersion’ modality which has become popular recently in the United States, in the context of this article, the term will be used to refer only to the type of (one-way) bilingual programmes which originated in Canada in the 1960s. Over the past four decades, the type of research carried out in this field has changed direction considerably, both in relation to focus and methodological orientation. The growing internationalisation of the immersion movement in many European nations, in certain Asian countries such as Hong Kong and Japan, and in Australia has led to the recognition of immersion as a world-wide phenomenon. Furthermore, the differing conceptualisations of immersion programmes as foreign language development, as minority language provision for majority language students, as language revival, as language support, and as contact with a language of power (Swain and Johnson, 1997) have meant that increasingly diverse research interests and concerns are being addressed in this field. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
The early Canadian immersion programmes were conceived right from the start as integrally bound up with a process of systematic evaluation and research. The focus was on assessment of their impact on the linguistic, intellectual, and attitudinal development of the children K. A. King and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 10: Research Methods in Language and Education, 217–228. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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involved (Lambert and Tucker, 1972). This type of extensively funded, policy-driven research was situated in a psychometric tradition, and designed to have immediate educational impact on school planning (Tosi, 1989). Thus, the actual lines of enquiry involved were largely restricted initially to a focus on educational outcomes, comparing immersion students with non-immersion students (de Courcy, 1997). This was explicitly recognised by Lapkin and Swain (1984) and justified by the perceived need to demonstrate to policy makers that immersion was indeed a viable educational alternative, and to reassure Anglophone parents that their children would not suffer either academically or in respect to their English language proficiency. The perf
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