Resumen de Minority language students in a French immersion programme: Their French proficiency

Eva-Rebecca Bild, Merril Swain

• Bilingual and unilingual students in a grade‐eight English‐French bilingual programme in Ontario were compared on measures of French proficiency. Forty‐seven students were selected on the basis of their first language: English, Italian or a non‐Romance language. French proficiency was measured using two written cloze tests and two oral story‐telling tasks. One of each pair of tests was presented in a context‐reduced condition and the other in a context‐embedded condition. As hypothesised, bilinguals were found to perform significantly better than unilinguals on almost all the measures. No differences were discernible, however, with respect to their performance on context‐embedded and context‐reduced tasks. It was concluded that knowing a second language facilitates the learning of a third language and thus, bilingual children are excellent candidates for French immersion programmes.