ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the task of developing a research agenda for French immersion education in the 1990s, an agenda that was eventually published in 1990 after much feedback from colleagues, parent groups, and various professional organizations. It focuses on how production mediates comprehension. The chapter demonstrates that at least some language learning proceeds from production to comprehension, rather than what is usually argued, from comprehension to production. It shows that the students the videotape that had been made of them during the noticing session, stopping the tape at each feature where they had noticed a difference between the story they had written and the reformulated version. The chapter analyses several extended examples from the transcribed data, one each from Emma, Jim and Anna, and Sue. Language learners often say, or write, more than they realize they are saying or writing, and it is through coming to understand what is meant by what they produced that language learning occurs.
