Academic Achievement In Bilingual And Immersion Education

This book is about two innovative methods for teachers of bilingual students to use in improving their academic achievement. Transacquisition Pedagogy or TAP developed by Tauwehe Sophie Tamati is the method described in the book’s first part. It uses principles of flexible bilingualism and a task sequenced approach. The success of TAP in an intervention study in two of New Zealand’s Māori schools illustrates how cognitive and linguistic processes can be used to increase student conceptual understanding and to improve their academic biliteracy. Part two is about the Curriculum Design Coherence Model (CDC Model) created by Elizabeth Rata. It shows teachers how to design concepts, content and competencies to connect academic knowledge and thinking processes. The CDC Model has proved its success in the Knowledge-Rich School Project in New Zealand and England. TransAcquistion Pedagogy and the CDC Model are aligned. TAP works by putting the CDC design method into practice. The separate usefulness of TAP and the CDC Model and the added value of their alignment provides an innovative approach to education. Used together or separately they provide invaluable teaching methods for bilingual, immersion and mainstream education.

Within bilingual education, more and more programs are adopting the option of immersion education, in which a second language is used as the medium of instruction. This volume illustrates the implementation immersion education in North America, Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa, showing its use in programs ranging from preprimary to tertiary level and demonstrating how it can function in foreign language teaching, for teaching a minority language to members of the language majority, for reviving or supporting languages at risk of extinction, and for helping learners acquire a language needed for wider communication or career advancement. A final section reviews lessons learned from experiences with immersion and explores new directions the approach is taking. This text will be of interest to teachers, teacher educators, and others involved in bilingual education.

In this volume an international roster of scholars offers theoretical perspectives, research reviews and empirical studies on teaching, learning and language development in immersion education. The editors bring together research from three distinct branches, including foreign language, bilingual and indigenous immersion programs.

This volume builds on Fortune and Tedick’s 2008 Pathways to Multilingualism: Evolving Perspectives on Immersion Education and showcases the practice and promise of immersion education through in-depth investigations of program design, implementation practices, and policies in one-way, two-way and indigenous programs. Contributors present new research and reflect on possibilities for strengthening practices and policies in immersion education. Questions explored include: What possibilities for program design exist in charter programs for both two-way and indigenous models? How do studies on learner outcomes lead to possibilities for improvements in program implementation? How do existing policies and practices affect struggling immersion learners and what possibilities can be imagined to better serve such learners? In addressing such questions, the volume invites readers to consider the possibilities of immersion education to enrich the language development and educational achievement of future generations of learners.

This report constitutes a synthesis of 10 years of research which was conducted to assist Ontario boards of education in implementing and evaluating French immersion programs in their jurisdictions. The immersion programs evaluated include three major alternatives: (1) the early total French immersion programs of the Carleton, Ottawa, and Toronto Boards of Education; (2) the early partial French immersion program of the Elgin County Board of Education; and (3) the late partial French immersion program of the Peel County Board of Education. Reference is also made to evaluations of similar immersion programs evaluated by other researchers in Ontario and throughout Canada. The report includes a description of the programs and information on the characteristics of some other bilingual education programs found in Ontario. In addition, the following information is provided: (1) discussion of the specific research questions and the research design; (2) presentation of the evaluation findings concerning the linguistic effects; (3) presentation of the findings on the academic effects; and (4) discussion of some social and psychological dimensions of French immersion programs. A bibliography is included on immersion education in Canada and the United States. (Author/AMH)