The present study explored negotiated interaction with Grade 6 students (age 11-12) engaged in communicative tasks supported by Club Penguin Island, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Unlike previous studies on digital games, the present study assessed the use of Club Penguin Island during face-to-face interaction.…

Fostering target language use in second language classrooms is a persistent challenge for teachers. A lack of specific guidelines in curriculum documents, inexperience with a wide variety of pedagogical approaches, and the tendency to default to English have been documented as reasons behind this challenge. Strategies from the neurolinguistic…

Poor retention rates for Core French, combined with the federal government's action plan to increase bilingualism in Canada, have led to the introduction of Intensive French (IF) in Grade 6 as an alternative for learning French. While anecdotal reports suggest that IF has no negative impact on English language skill development, empirical evidence…

This study explores the identities that Grade 8 early French immersion students construct as learners of French within school-based communities of practice. It suggests a model by which metaphors on language learning can be considered a form of narrative used to both elicit and analyze metacognitive representations of their socially situated…

Over a three-year collaborative partnership involving university researchers, government curriculum specialists, and school division teams and educators, this post-qualitative study has engaged a diffractive methodology to research pedagogical change in relationship to a renewed provincial curriculum framework in English Language Arts (ELA). In…

Using critical interpretive procedures, this synthesis reviews qualitative and quantitative empirical studies (N = 181) published between 2000 and 2017 in the Canadian French as a Second Language (FSL) K-12 context. This study examines the thematic focus of findings relevant to key stakeholders (i.e., students, teachers, teacher candidates,…

This study explores the cross-linguistic reading strategies that 16 Grade 3-4 French immersion pupils schooled in Saskatchewan used while reading two types of dual-language children's books: translated and integrated. In the first type, the same text appears in both French and English, whereas in the second one, English and French are integrated…

Across curricular terrains in education in North America, the use of the term "inquiry" has become more prevalent than ever. This radical turn from traditional content curriculum toward inquiry-based approaches to teaching raises issues about the promise and potential challenges of contemporary curriculum in K-12 L2 settings. This…

This study explores the code-switching practices of five core ESL teachers from the elementary grades in Quebec francophone schools. Through a fine-grained emic analysis of the teachers' reasons for code-switching, the study illuminates how they variously used French as a resource to fulfil their institutional roles as teachers. In addition, the…

As our global communication and linguistic landscapes continue to change, kindergarten to Grade 12 (K-12) students are engaging in a variety of literacy practices (on both page and screen) in technology-enhanced classrooms. Due to the affordances of technologies, individuals are moving fluidly between various learning spaces within and outside the…

Self-assessments are instructional tools with the potential to enhance self-regulatory and language-learning processes in students in the writing classroom. Although widely studied in the first language context, self-assessment research in L2 writing contexts is relatively unexplored. Yet recent research indicates that the demands of writing in a…

Bilingual language education in Canada comprises Bilingual Programs in minority languages and programs in official languages (e.g., French immersion). However, pedagogy in Bilingual Programs has not been studied to the same depth as it has been in French Immersion, so little is known about the teaching practices within them. Immersion pedagogy,…

This study examined the performance of Mandarin-speaking students in a K-Grade 4 50/50 Chinese/English bilingual program. The program was intended to facilitate students' learning of English and their adjustment to English-medium instruction within the school context. The bilingual-program students were compared to students from Mandarin-speaking…

Grounded in the cross-linguistic influence(s) (CLI) literature, this study used objective measures to compare the use of English, lexical richness and syntactic complexity, and grammatical accuracy and fluency in the texts of three groups of Grade 6 French immersion students: Canadian-born anglophones (C-A), Canadian-born multilinguals (C-M), and…