Immigrants outperform Canadian-born groups in French immersion: examining factors that influence their achievement

Abstract

This paper examines the French achievement results of three groups of students: Canadian-born English/French bilingual, Canadian-born multilingual and immigrant multilingual Grade 6 French immersion students, by investigating how the variables of integrative and instrumental motivations, attitudes to the learning situation, French language anxiety, motivation to learn French and oral, receptive and written willingness to communicate affect their achievement in French. Different from research with immigrant communities learning a minority language outside of Canada, this research corroborates other Canadian research where the immigrant group outperforms the Canadian-born groups in French achievement. Subsequent ANOVAs and post-hoc tests on questionnaire data showed the multilingual immigrant group to have higher integrative and instrumental motivations and were more willing to speak in French. Of these variables, integrative motivation, willingness to communicate (reading and writing) and attitude to the learning situation predicted the test results. Memberships in the Canadian-born groups were associated with negative results.

Keywords:

• multilingual language acquisition
• French immersion
• second language education

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank Jordana Garbati and Ibtissem Knouzi for providing me with valuable feedback on the draft version of this paper.

Notes

1. By English-dominant Ontario I do not mean to suggest that these regions are homogeneous. Rather I use the term to suggest that the vast majority of the educational system in this area is English and the language of the province is also English. This is in contrast to the province of Québec where the provincial language is French.

2. A programme in which French, the immersion language, is used for at least 50% of the school day.

3. In the context of this study, in the case of the two latter groups, multilingual describes participants whose home language is other than English or French. They come from a variety of non-romance language backgrounds.

4. The term is used to identify students from homes where language of the community is not the primary language of communication (Gonzalez, Pagan, Wendell, & Love, 2011).

5. Core French is the study of French as a subject in one short daily period.

6. Middle French immersion is a model of French immersion that begins in Grade 4.

7. Students begin an intensive study of French in Grade 7.

8. Number of items used to form composite variable.