Immersion education and cognitive strategies: Can the obstacle be the advantage in a multilingual society?

Abstract

This paper focusses on the teaching of non-linguistic subject matters in a second or third language through bilingual education. We investigate how this specific educational framework influences the development of linguistic competence as well as disciplinary knowledge. Based on a large-scale corpus of classroom interactions collected in bilingual education programmes in multilingual Switzerland and touching on various disciplines (biology, history, physics, maths), our contribution discusses how situated knowledge is acquired through L2 and L1 language processing, and how the conversational strategies used by teachers and learners focus on form and content through the interaction of the two languages of education. Whereas, code-switching – here specifically the use of the mainstream language (L1) in an L2 educational setting – is often regarded as a learner-oriented facilitating strategy, we argue that it enhances the learner's metalinguistic ability. Thus, code-switching relies on the conversational routines of bi/multilingual communication settings. It also deals with the opacity of the subject matter by making the new concepts more familiar in L2, and more salient in L1. Bi/multilingual discourse is argued to function as an interface between linguistic and disciplinary knowledge in the process of introducing concepts and making them operational at different levels of complexity. Other basic cognitive strategies – such as sorting information, categorisation, argumentative organisation – also benefit from the multilingual construction of knowledge in various disciplines.

Keywords:

• Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)
• bilingual education
• immersion
• integrated models
• code-switching
• metalinguistic awareness

Acknowledgements

Project funded by the Swiss National Foundation ‘Construction intégrée des savoirs linguistiques et disciplinaires dans l'enseignement bilingue au secondaire et au tertiaire’ (FNS no 405640-108656).

Notes

1. This notion partly re-defines and extends the idea of ‘shield’ presented by Gajo (2001). The two notions are similar in that L2 protects the learner, but whereas the ‘shield’ grants the learner with a right to make mistakes at a micro-level, the ‘mask’, on the other hand, encourages the learner to try more complex structures and to experiment with the argumentative structure of language at a macro-level.