Functional Grammar in French Immersion: A Classroom Experiment1

Harley, Birgit

doi:10.1093/applin/10.3.331

Cited by 188 publications

(181 citation statements)

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“…Day and Shapson reported having observed a tendency during the instructional activities for students to contextualise their speech in the present, thus eliminating the need to use the conditional to express hypothetical meaning and thereby decreasing opportunities to practise using conditionals in a meaningful context. As in the Harley (1989) study, therefore, the focus on form during the oral activities was superseded by more spontaneous expression and the use of simplified forms.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Activities promoting noticing and language awareness appear to have had less emphasis than production activities and, furthermore, the production activities emphasised communicative meaning-based practice much more than controlled practice. Because activities promoting noticing, language awareness and controlled practice were more apparent in the study on second-person pronouns and in both studies on grammatical gender, I would argue that more opportunities for noticing and language awareness, in addition to controlled automaticity practice and provision of feedback, might have been more effective at helping learners in the Harley (1989) and Day and Shapson (1991) studies to restructure interlanguage representations and proceduralise more target-like uses of tense and aspect.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…I acknowledge, however, that a multitude of factors, well beyond instructional variables, can affect learning outcomes in classroom intervention studies. For example, in both the Harley (1989) study and the Day and Shapson (1991) study, comparison teachers reported that they too were teaching the target forms. In both studies, learners exposed to the experimental treatment did in fact continue to progress throughout the study, but the significant effects were neutralised by improvement made by students in comparison classes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Research on form-focused instruction in immersion classrooms: implications for theory and practice

Lyster¹

2004

French Language Studies

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This article presents a comparative analysis of five quasi-experimental studies involving close to 1,200 students, ranging in age from 7 to 14, in 49 French immersion classrooms in Canada – a content-based instructional context where learners develop high levels of communicative ability yet demonstrate a levelling-off effect in their grammatical development. The studies investigated the effects of form-focused instruction on four areas known to be difficult for anglophone learners of French: perfect vs. imperfect past tense, conditional mood, second-person pronouns and grammatical gender. Findings suggest that effective form-focused instruction in immersion contexts, at least with respect to interlanguage features that have reached a developmental plateau, includes a balanced distribution of opportunities for noticing, language awareness and controlled practice with feedback. Less effective instructional options overemphasise negotiation for meaning in oral tasks where message comprehensibility and communication strategies circumvent the need for learners to move beyond the use of interlanguage forms.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Research on form-focused instruction in immersion classrooms: implications for theory and practice

Lyster¹

2004

French Language Studies

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“…A set of intervention studies conducted in French immersion classrooms ranging from 1st to 8th grade demonstrated the variable effects of form-focused instruction on a range of challenging target features in French: grammatical gender (Harley, 1998;Lyster, 2004), second-person pronouns (Lyster, 1994), conditional verb forms (Day & Shapson, 2001), functional distinctions between perfect and imperfect past tenses (Harley, 1989), verbs of motion (Wright, 1996), and derivational morphology (Lyster, Quiroga, & Ballinger, 2013). The instructional treatments in these intervention studies generally proved effective at improving target language accuracy, but especially so in cases where the activities differed from other activities more typical of content-based instruction.…”

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confidence: 99%

Using form-focused tasks to integrate language across the immersion curriculum

Lyster

2015

System

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a b s t r a c tThis article reports on two form-focused quasi-experimental intervention studies conducted in French immersion classrooms in the Montreal area, each of which involved a different task-based approach that crossed borders either between content areas or between languages. The first study integrated a focus on grammatical gender across 5th-grade students' (10 e11 years old) language arts, social studies, and science classes. Students engaged in formfocused tasks that were related to these different content areas and that also drew their attention to noun endings that reliably predict grammatical gender. The content focus then provided contexts for practice in associating gender attribution with noun endings. The second study integrated a linguistic focus on derivational morphology that crossed borders between the English and French classes of 2nd-grade students (7e8 years old). Their teachers co-designed and implemented biliteracy tasks associated with the French and English editions of illustrated storybooks that they read aloud in their respective French and English classes. The storybooks and related tasks were employed to highlight cross-lingual connections between languages and to enhance students' awareness of derivational morphology. In addition to reporting the positive outcomes of both interventions, the article addresses some of the challenges that arise when tasks are extended across languages and content areas.

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“…A set of intervention studies conducted in French immersion classrooms ranging from Grades 2 to 8 demonstrated the variable effects of form-focused instruction on a range of challenging target features in French: grammatical gender (Harley, 1998;Lyster, 2004), second-person pronouns (Lyster, 1994), conditional verb forms (Day & Shapson, 2001), functional distinctions between perfect and imperfect past tenses (Harley, 1989), verbs of motion (Wright, 1996), and derivational morphology (Lyster, Quiroga, & Ballinger, 2013). In the context of a Grade 5 two-way immersion (Spanish-English) classroom in the U.S., Tedick and Young (2014) observed the teacher's use of noticing, awareness, and practice activities to improve students' use of imperfect and preterit past tenses.…”

Section: Form-focused Instructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Research perspectives on immersion pedagogy

Lyster

Tedick

2014

JICB

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This article presents an overview of immersion pedagogy and how it has developed over the years in conjunction with classroom research and evolving classroom practices. We first consider initial conceptualization of immersion pedagogy as being primarily content-based and input-driven with only an incidental focus on the immersion language. We consider the strengths and weaknesses of this approach as a means to explain subsequent recommendations for a more systematic focus on language in immersion pedagogy. We then review classroom research investigating various pedagogical means of enhancing immersion students' metalinguistic awareness through form-focused instruction, corrective feedback, and cross-lingual pedagogy. We conclude with questions and issues for future research and development in the realm of immersion pedagogy. Additional abstract at endKeywords: immersion pedagogy; content-based instruction; form-focused instruction; corrective feedback; cross-lingual pedagogy Amid the flourishing movement of naturalistic and communicative language teaching methods of the 1980s, which assumed that implicit acquisition determines second language (L2) performance and obviates the need for explicit instructional intervention (e.g., Krashen, 1985), studies of L2 learners in programs such as French immersion in Canada revealed that, even after many years of exposure to the immersion language, students exhibited lower-than-expected levels of grammatical accuracy, lexical variety, and sociolinguistic competence ). These outcomes are now thought to be the result of initial conceptualizations of immersion pedagogy, which underrated the extent to which students needed to attend to the immersion language to ensure optimal conditions for its acquisition. Accordingly, to paint a portrait of what is now known about immersion pedagogy, this article will first identify some essential mcgillcan IP: 132.206.197.109 On: Tue, 11 Apr 2017 17:56:31 Research perspectives on immersion pedagogy 211 characteristics of content-based input and instruction while also highlighting their limitations, and then report on instructional initiatives and teacher perspectives related to integrating a systematic focus on language in immersion pedagogy. The article concludes with questions and issues for future research and development.

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Functional Grammar in French Immersion: A Classroom Experiment1

Cited by 188 publications

References 0 publications

Research on form-focused instruction in immersion classrooms: implications for theory and practice

Research on form-focused instruction in immersion classrooms: implications for theory and practice

Using form-focused tasks to integrate language across the immersion curriculum

Research perspectives on immersion pedagogy

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