Second Language Acquisition and Form-Focused Instruction in Immersion: Teaching for Learning

Abstract

While research on language immersion education has highlighted a multitude of benefits such as cognitive skills, academic achievement and language and literacy development, some studies have also identified challenges to its effective implementation, particularly as they relate to language acquisition. It has been suggested that the less than optimal levels of students’ immersion language “persist in part because immersion teachers lack systematic approaches for integrating language into their content instruction” (Tedick, Christian, & Fortune, 2011, p. 7). Students’ interlanguage has aspects that are borrowed, transferred and generalised from the mother tongue and differs from both the immersion language and the mother tongue. After a period of sustained development, interlanguage appears to stabilise and certain non-target like features tend to fossilise. Research has long suggested that effective immersion pedagogy needs to counterbalance both form-oriented and meaning-oriented approaches. This paper reviews the literature in relation to the linguistic deficiencies in immersion students’ L2 proficiency and form-focused instruction is examined as a viable solution to this pedagogic puzzle. Key instructional elements of form-focused instruction are unpacked and some pedagogical possibilities are considered in an attempt to identify and discuss strategies that will enable immersion learners to refine their grammatical and lexical systems as they proceed.