Linking languages through a bilingual read-aloud project

Abstract

The present study was carried out in French immersion classrooms in an urban Quebec school board that is increasingly characterised by the heterogeneity of its French-dominant, English-dominant, and French/English bilingual student population. The study explored the extent to which a bilingual read-aloud project would (1) raise teachers' awareness of the bilingual resources of their students, (2) encourage students' cross-linguistic collaboration, and (3) promote teachers' cross-curricular and cross-linguistic collaboration. The participants were three English and three French teachers of three classes of six- to eight-year-old children. The French and English teachers of each class read aloud to their students from the same storybooks over four months, alternating the reading of one chapter in the French class and another in the English class. The data consist of (1) video recordings of the read-aloud sessions and discussion about the stories, (2) interviews and stimulated-recall sessions with the teachers, and (3) student focus-group interviews as well as a student questionnaire administered at the end of the project. Results are reported in terms of the enthusiasm of both students and teachers for the project, the opportunities it created for teachers and students to focus on both language and content, and the extent to which teachers collaborated to do so.

Keywords:

• bilingual education
• awareness-raising
• collaboration
• literacy practices
• second language learning
• cross-linguistic contrasts
• immersion
• reading aloud

Acknowledgements

The bilingual read-aloud project received financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant 820-2005-1015). We gratefully acknowledge the generous co-operation of the participating principals, teachers, and students. We would also like to recognise the following research assistants who contributed to various phases of this study: Juan Abrile, Gabrielle Beaudoin, Jacqueline Landry, Myra Lepp, Alicia Piechowiak, Masatoshi Sato, Jimena Terraza, Cathy Thibault, Dina Tsoulos, and Mélanie Walkty. Parts of this study were presented in June 2008 at the annual meetings of the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics in Vancouver and the Association of Language Awareness in Hong Kong, as well as in October 2008 at the ‘Pathways to Bilingualism and Beyond’ conference in St Paul, MN.

Notes

1. The language dominance of the children was initially identified by the teachers and then verified during the classroom observations and student questionnaires administered at the end of the study.

2. In Quebec it is common for French immersion teachers to have completed a general bachelor of education degree focused on the French mother tongue, with little or no training in L2 pedagogy. Similarly, because the model of immersion ‘assumes’ homogeneous groups of anglophone children, the English language arts teachers have usually been trained in English mother tongue pedagogy.