Linking Languages Through a Bilingual Real-Aloud Project

The authors carried out a study in French immersion classrooms in a Montreal school board that is characterised by the heterogeneity of its French-dominant, English-dominant, and French/English bilingual student population. The authors explored the extent to which a bilingual read-aloud project would (1) raise teachers' awareness of the bilingual resources of their students, (2) encourage students' cross-linguistic collaboration, and (3) promote teachers' cross-curricular and cross-linguistic collaboration. The participants were three English and three French teachers of three classes of six- to eight-year-old children. The French and English teachers of each class read aloud to their students from the same storybooks over four months, alternating the reading of one chapter in the French class and another in the English class. The data consist of (1) video recordings of the read-aloud sessions and discussion about the stories, (2) interviews and stimulated-recall sessions with the teachers, and (3) student focus-group interviews as well as a student questionnaire administered at the end of the project. Results are reported in terms of the enthusiasm of both students and teachers for the project, the opportunities it created for teachers and students to focus on both language and content, and the extent to which teachers collaborated to do so.

Language Awareness

Vol. 18

no. 3-4

366-383

2009

en