Vocabulary Skills of French Immersion Students in their Second Language

Vocabulary knowledge is known to be crucial for reading comprehension and for dealing with academic content in a second language (e.g., Garcia, 1991; Hazenberg and Hulstijn, 1996; Laufer, 1992; Nation, 1993). In French immersion programs, where much of the school curriculum is taught in the second language, an important issue therefore concerns students' lexical development in French. With the current emphasis in schools on using educationally enriching, authentic French content in regular 'core' French programs as well, lexical development is of primary importance in this context too. Indeed, numerous recent publications addressed to language teachers and applied linguists concerned with learners in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., Coady and Huckin, 1997; Harley, 1995; Hatch and Brown, 1995; Nation, 1990; Huckin, Haynes, and Coady, 1993; Schmitt and McCarthy, 1997; Singleton, 1999) signal growing recognition of the key role of vocabulary knowledge in the development of second language proficiency. This article first provides a summary account of vocabulary-oriented research conducted in recent years in French immersion classrooms, leading up to a new study examining a specific aspect of the lexical development of French immersion students vis-à-vis core French students: namely, their word analysis skills in the second language, French. The ability to analyse the internal structure of words is important because it can provide access to many new words and increase 'potential vocabulary' (Palmberg, 1987) in the second language. In immersion and core French programs in Canada, most French-as-asecond-language materials currently in use pay little or no attention to such skills. One aim of this study, therefore, is to determine what word analysis skills students at different grade levels in these programs now have in order to provide useful diagnostic information for teachers and a solid empirical basis for the development of relevant classroom materials.