Immersion and Submersion Classrooms: A Comparison of Instructional Practices in Language Arts

• Autores: Lucy Fazio, Roy Lyster
• Localización: Journal of multilingual and multicultural development, ISSN 0143-4632, Vol. 19, Nº. 4, 1998, págs. 303-317
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Using the Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) observation scheme (Spada & Frohlich,1995), this study compares the second language (L2) learning environments of elementary-level students of French in four submersion and four immersion classrooms in the Montreal area. The database is composed of almost 60 hours of observations during language arts lessons: 28.4 hours in the four submersion classrooms, so named because they are designed for native speakers of French but comprise a large number of minority-language students obliged to attend French-language schools, and 30.5 hours in the four French immersion classrooms, composed of a majority of anglophone students attending English-language schools. Results indicate clear differences between the two environments. Language arts lessons in the four submersion classrooms are predominantly analytic; the content focus is primarily on language form and most materials entail only minimal discourse.Conversely,language arts lessons in the four immersion classrooms involve a more balanced combination of analytic and experiential orientations, including more variety in classroom organisation, content thatfocuses on both language and other topics, and text that includes more extended discourse.