Analyzes how Canadian immersion education has developed from its origins to the present in terms of a cycle guided by the interplay between theory and classroom practice of second- language acquisition. Johnson responds by questioning the extent to which bilingual education theory and practices are universal or context specific. (38 references)…

Summarizes an evaluation of an early French immersion program at grades 6 and 8. In English language skills, immersion students performed as well as, or better than, English-only program groups; in mathematics and sciences, immersion students did as well as their comparison group. Other findings are discussed. (PJM)

Compares two different types of bilingual education programs--the Canadian immersion programs, designed primarily for foreign language enrichment, and the European School bilingual education program, designed primarily for language maintenance. Achievement scores for both approaches were comparable, pointing to the importance of environment and…

A comparison of the French proficiency of bilingual and monolingual native English, Italian, or non-Romance language speaking eighth graders in an Ontario bilingual program found that the bilingual students generally performed better than monolingual students on cloze procedure tests and story telling tasks. (40 references) (Author/CB)