Acquiring the language of instruction: Effect of home language experience

The study followed 6-year-old children in Canadian French Immersion for three years to investigate the effect of home language background on acquisition of French, the language of schooling. None of the children knew French before beginning the program. French proficiency was indicated by French vocabulary and verbal fluency tasks. A language background questionnaire was used to (a) assign children to monolingual or bilingual groups and (b) provide a continuous score for degree of bilingual experience. Categorical analyses showed bilingual children had smaller English vocabulary than monolingual children when they entered the program. For French vocabulary, categorical comparisons revealed no language group differences in the first two years but higher French scores for bilingual children in the third year. In contrast, analyses of the continuous scores revealed a relation between more bilingual experience and higher French vocabulary throughout. Similarly, categorical analyses of verbal fluency results indicated no significant language group differences for either semantic or phonological fluency, but continuous analyses of semantic fluency showed an association between more bilingual experience and better outcomes in each year. These results suggest that language experience impacts progress in learning the language of schooling and that different analytic approaches reveal different aspects of the pattern.