Assessment of oral communicative skills in early French immersion programmes

Abstract

This article presents the results of an assessment of the oral communicative skills of grade 3 early French immersion children in the province of British Columbia. The instrument developed for the study measures speaking skills through a story‐retelling and group discussion task. It was administered to 110 immersion children from 11 school districts in British Columbia and 25 Francophone children (comparison group) from Greater Montreal. The scoring included qualitative ratings of both the linguistic and communicative aspects of the children's speech as well as quantitative analyses of the children's grammar and vocabulary. The results indicated that the British Columbia immersion children were developing good oral communicative skills in their second language. They were not comparable to their Francophone counterparts on the linguistic aspects of their speech (i.e. pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary) or in their fluency. However, they were comparable or nearly comparable on the more communicative measures (i.e. story organisation, discussion information, and comprehensibility). The implications of the findings and the authors’ experiences in designing group tests are discussed.

Notes

The study reported on in this article was partially funded by the Ministry of Education, British Columbia.