The bilingual advantage for immigrant students in French immersion in Canada: linking advantages to contextual variables

Abstract

This study compares the English and French proficiencies of three groups of early French immersion participants at the Grade 6 level: Canadian-born English-speaking, Canadian-born multilingual, and immigrant multilingual students. In addition to English and French multi-skills tests, the participants completed a questionnaire designed to gather data on metalinguistic awareness, strategy use and self-assessments of their languages. The results showed that the immigrant group outperformed the other two groups on the French proficiency tests whereas there were no significant differences on the English tests or in self-assessed language of origin proficiencies for the multilingual groups. Superior performance of the immigrant group was not determined to be a result of enhanced metalinguistic knowledge or strategy use.

Keywords:

• multilingual education
• multilingual language acquisition
• second language education
• second language acquisition

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr Stephanie Arnott (University of Ottawa) and Dr Miles Turnbull (Bishop’s University) for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The FI program described here offers a minimum of 50% of its content delivery through French with the remainder offered in English.

2. In this study’s context early FI begins in Grade 1 with 50% of the classes offered in French.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2014-1293].