ABSTRACT
B. Laplante recommended that greater emphasis be placed on contextualizing the academic language structures. During the modeling of the Spanish inner voice, the instructors explicitly focused on the language strategies they used. They also drew students’ attention to the academic language that they used. Students were encouraged to pay attention to the strategies used in performing academic language tasks. Immersion educators both in Canada and in the United States have found linguistic gaps in immersion learners’ foreign language proficiency. Especially in the early years of immersion, the programs tended to be evaluated in terms of the foreign language proficiency achieved. Andrew Cohen found that fifth and sixth-grade Spanish language immersion students in a St. Paul school used English more often than Spanish to solve word problems in math. Two instructors were involved in the study: a teacher with immersion experience and a research assistant, both of whom were native speakers of Spanish.
