French Immersion and Classroom Behavior

French Immersion and Classroom BehaviorAuthor(s): Stephen Richer and Florence AndrewsSource: The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 8, No. 4(Autumn, 1983), pp. 377-393Published by: Canadian Journal of SociologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3339847 .

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French immersion and classroom behavior

Stephen Richer Florence Andrews

Abstract. The paper develops a set of hypotheses about the classroom behavior of immersion and regular school children from a general theoretical framework derived from the immigration literature. Contrary to expectations, higher deviance was found in the immersion classes. The tenta- tive data on cohesion provided support for the framework. Some suggestions for future research are made with a view to explicating more clearly the social processes operating in immersion settings.

Rdsume. Cet article soumet quelques hypotheses quant au comportement en classe d'immersion et d'ecoliers r6guliers, et ce d'un point de vue th6orique d6coulant d'etudes sur le proces d'immigration. Contrairement a ce que l'on pourrait croire, les classes d'immersion connaissent un taux plus eleve de d6viation. Les donnees provisoires sur la cohesion vont dans le sens du cadre de cette recherche. L'etude offre quelques suggestions d'explication portant sur les rapports sociaux qui prevalent dans des situations d'immersion.

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Introduction The major theme running through the various reports of the Royal Commis- sion on Bilingualism and Biculturalism concerns the preservation of the Ca- nadian duality. This implies, for the authors, both mother tongue language instruction as well as second language instruction in the other official tongue (Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Books 1 and 2, 1967; 1968).

Two major modes of French language instruction for Anglophone elementary children currently exist in Canada:

1. a daily 20 or 30 minute period of French 2. a complete immersion of the child in French to the virtual exclusion of

communication in English.

Although the latter is a relatively recent development, some work has already been undertaken in examining its consequences for children. Such work has concentrated exclusively on the effects of immersion on second-language learning, on native-language learning, on the learning of non-language subjects, on attitudes towards French Canadians, and on intelligence. The state of knowledge in the field may be summarized as follows (Lambert and Gardner, 1972; Lambert and Tucker, 1972; Barik, McTavish and Swain, 1973; Barik and Swain, 1976; Swain and Lapkin, 1981).' 1. Immersion produces students with a high level of knowledge in the second

language. 2. Immersion in a second language does not produce long-term effects on the

student's own native-language learning. 3. There are no long-term detrimental effects of immersion on learning

non-language subjects. 4. Immersion children are more charitable in their ratings of French Cana-

dians than control groups in traditional primary schools. 5. There does not appear to be any effect of immersion on intelligence.

The focus of the present paper is on aspects of immersion as yet virtually unstudied - classroom social behavior and classroom structure. Specifically, we intend to examine consequences of an immersion program in kindergar- tens for classroom deviance and cohesion. Control of classrooms is a current problem in the sociology and psychology of education. Cohesion is a phenomenon which is featured in research on small groups. Knowledge of the effects of immersion upon these issues will elucidate important aspects of the education experiences of a large number of Canadian children, provide additional information about second language learning, and contribute to the literature

1. These results might be unique to certain settings and students. Immersion programs are not

universally successful (Greenfield, 1978; Lamy, 1977).

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on classroom control. Further, the study, in its focus on the social consequences of immersion, redresses somewhat the inordinate attention given in the literature to the cognitive impacts of educational programs.2

Immersion, deviance and cohesion: an analogy with recent immigrant groups In attempting to find a reasonable theoretical framework within which to cast the present research, we turned to the immigrant literature for studies which examined the kind of group structure which is represented by immersion classes. While recognizing that some caution was in order in applying a theoretical perspective which was utilized to analyze macro-sociological phe- nomena to our classroom situation, we nevertheless felt little scientific guilt in using this literature as a starting point to develop a set of hypotheses.

The situation of children in immersion classes is conspicuously similar to that of recent immigrants, who are forced, particularly in the occupational sphere, to interact in a language not their own. Research on such groups re- veals relatively consistent results in regard to patterns of deviance and extent of within-group cohesion. Canadian deviance research indicates that the lowest crime rates tend to be found among those groups whose native language is not English (Vallee and Schwartz, 1961: 564). Recent non-English-speaking immigrants are confronted with a situation where control of information and communication is in the hands of a dominant majority. In order to survive in such an environment the most urgent task is to ac- quire the language. Furthermore, presuming a strong motivation to integrate into the new society, there is, at least initially, relatively high conformity to establishment norms.

In immersion classes the children, in analogous fashion, are in a state of unilateral dependence vis-a-vis the teacher. She has virtually exclusive control over information, holding as well the key to communication itself. One would therefore expect lower rates of deviance among such children as compared to a similar group of children in a regular primary program. Our first hypothesis, then, is as follows:

Hypothesis 1: Immersion children will exhibit lower rates of deviance than a comparable group of regular children.

The research on recently arrived immigrant groups whose language is different from that of the host society supports as well the general conclusion of high in-group cohesion. After Cartwright and Zander we may define cohesion as "the attractiveness of a group for its members" (Cartwright and Zander, 1960). In the immigrant literature, studies fairly consistently suggest that high initial cohesion is the typical pattern (O'Bryan, Reitz, and

2. Indeed, there are only a handful of studies on such consequences. See Swain and Lapkin (1981), especially Chapter 6.

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Kuplawska, 1974; Anderson, 1975; Anderson, 1974). That is, the group serves as a kind of buffer between the individual and a potentially threatening set of external factors. We suggest again that this same process might be operating in immersion classrooms. Anglophone children confronted for the first time with an exclusively French linguistic milieu are under conditions of relative uncertainty. Firstly, they must obviously cope with the fundamental problem of communicating with their teacher. Sec- ondly, as with new members of any social group, they must learn the appropriate rules governing their classroom behavior. And finally, because our subjects are kindergarten children, they must also learn the set of rules governing their behavior in school in general. While these latter two tasks admittedly confront our control group of regular kindergarten children as well, their difficulty is likely compounded by the linguistic factor. As a reac- tion to these circumstances we would expect greater peer cohesion to be displayed in the immersion classes. More formally:

Hypothesis 2. Immersion children will exhibit a higher level of cohesion than a comparable group of regular children.

Methods The data derive from six kindergarten classes in a suburban Ottawa Anglo- phone community. Three are French immersion classes and three are regular kindergarten classes. In this particular community the parents were given the choice of enrolling their children in either of the two types of programs. We were thus fortunate in having two groups of children from the same resi- dential area, who would, we speculated, likely be relatively similar in socio-economic background.

Originally, we began with four classes, two in an immersion school and two in a regular school. It was later felt, however, that one more class of each would better enable us to generalize our findings, although it meant a reduc- tion in the total amount of time spent in each classroom. We would defend this, however, by pointing out that each 15 or 20 minute visit yielded a very large amount of data, since our time-sampling technique required measures to be taken within time intervals as short as 30 or 60 seconds. The measures utilized will be outlined in the ensuing section.

The four original classes were taught by two teachers, each teaching a morning and afternoon kindergarten group. The regular teacher was an Anglophone while her immersion counterpart was a Francophone, a typical situation in the Ottawa area. One teacher had taught for ten years, the other for eight. The four original classes were visited a total of 38 times between 20 September 1976 and 27 April 1977. Data were typically collected every second week, with each type of class being observed, researchers' schedules permitting, on the same days.

The two additional classes were observed during the period 25 February

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to 27 April, a total of 24 visits made. The immersion classroom was in the same school as the two original immersion classes; however, as the original regular school had only two kindergarten classes, we were forced to go to another school in the same neighborhood for our third regular class. The new immersion teacher was in her third year of teaching and was a bilingual Anglophone while the regular teacher was Anglophone and had seven years experience. All teachers were female. The study team consisted of four and sometimes five researchers, two always going together to each observation session. Data were gathered systematically on four types of variables: (1) nature of teacher-student interaction; (2) classroom composition; (3) deviance; and (4) cohesion. The data on teacher-student interaction were necessary in order to attempt to gain some control over the teacher factor. Since our regular and immersion groups were obviously not randomly assigned to teachers, we were obliged to consider seriously the possibility that any differences we found might thus be due at least partially to differences in teaching style, as opposed to the structure of immersion itself.

The classroom composition data were gathered in order to examine the extent to which our two types of classes were different in basic variables likely to be related to deviance and cohesion. Data on sex composition, education of parents, and pre-school experience for the six classrooms are presented in Table 1.

The data are consistent with a widely-held belief about children in immersion classes in Canada; namely the generally higher socio-economic sta- tus of their families. The preschool differences no doubt mean that a larger percentage of the immersion mothers were working during the previous year, an interpretation consistent with their higher level of formal educational

Table 1. A comparison of the six classes on selected variables (in percentages).'

Immersion Immersion Regular Regular Teacher A Teacher B Teacher A Teacher B

Four original classes Two additional classes

AM PM AM AM PM AM

Boys 54 55 55 56 53 55 Fathers with 64 78 70 48 63 60 university degrees Mothers with 31 36 35 13 21 *

university degrees Preschool experience 75 78 65 61 63 45 N (number of children (24) (18) (20) (23) (19) (22) in the class)

* Information not available. 1. Source: school records.

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training. The overall social class bias of the immersion group is quite amaz- ing when one considers that the community under study is generally a middle-class suburban area so that the variance in SES is already severely attenuated. Nevertheless, we still find an almost statistically significant self-selection of higher educated families into the immersion program.

These differences might be argued to distort our interpretation of results, particularly when one considers that children with pre-school experience are probably less likely to be deviance prone. As it turns out, however, the problem of interpretation does not arise since our deviance hypothesis is not sup- ported. We shall, nevertheless, return to these differences in SES and pre- school composition later in the paper.

OperationalizItion of variables

Teacher-student interaction As suggested above, some measure of teacher "style" was deemed necessary in order to make statements about the effects of the immersion program as opposed to those deriving from inter-teacher differences. To this end, we gathered systematic data in each class on two types of sessions: formal teaching sessions on the one hand, and free play and independent work sessions on the other. The formal teaching took place when the children were gathered in a group around the teacher. This typically occurred during the first period of the day, and involved activities such as discussion of the weather, the day and month, motor coordination exercises, story readings and letter and number recognition. The content of teacher communication in these sessions (which usually lasted 15-20 minutes) was captured by a modified version of Flanders' interaction profile (Flanders, 1970). Everything the teacher said was coded in one of seven categories, listed below.

1. Accepts feeling 2. Praises 3. Accepts ideas 4. Asks questions 5. Lectures 6. Gives directions 7. Gives criticism

At the same time, information was gathered on whether the interaction was teacher or student initiated and whether it was addressed to an individual child or to the group as a whole. A particular interaction was terminated and a new one coded when (a) the teacher left the student to go to another student, or (b) the teacher changed from one category to another with the same student. These data give us a profile for each teacher on (a) the extent of "instrumental" versus "expressive" interaction (categories 5, 6 and 7 versus the others); (b) the degree of symmetry in the teaching sessions (extent

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of student versus teacher initiated interaction); and (c) the degree of "personalization" of the teacher's style (the extent of individual versus group interaction). Reliability for these three measures, as measured by the percentage agreements between two observers (Emme and Millett, 1970) ranged from .70 to .85 for the first measure, from .80 to .93 for the second, and from .90 to .98 for the third.

For the free play and independent work periods we found it impossible to gather such detailed information on the content of interaction, as the large number of individual teacher-student contacts proved impossible to monitor. We therefore had to content ourselves with noting simply instrumental versus expressive interaction, without breaking these down further into their component parts. We also retained the teacher versus student initiation dimension as well as the individual versus group variable. Reliability for these relatively unstructured sessions proved to be higher than in the formal teaching periods, undoubtedly due to the lack of necessity for split-second judgments on the seven interaction categories. Reliability coefficients ranged from .80 to .91.

Classroom deviance We sought a measure of deviance which would reflect the extent of conformity to basic classroom norms. Previous research (e.g., Jackson, 1968; Brophy and Good, 1974; Richer, 1975), as well as our own observations in this study convinced us that the most important norms were those related to appropriate student comportment, particularly while the teacher was speaking. Sit- ting up straight, putting one's hand up to speak, paying close attention to the teacher - these reflected the dominant values of classroom order and social control. We decided, then, to take most of our deviance measures during the structured teaching sessions.

The major measure we used derived from an instrument ideal for our purposes - the Jackson and Hudgins attentiveness schedule (Lahaderne, 1967). This is a technique based on time sampling of a randomly selected group of children in a given class. One simply makes a "sweep" of the sample every minute or so and makes a judgment as to whether each child is attentive (scored "+") or inattentive ("-"). If the researcher is unsure of a child's attentiveness, he codes a question mark (?), and if the particular child is out of the room a zero (0) is entered. Indicators of inattentiveness are spelled out in detail by Jackson and Hudgins, and include: eyes not focused on the teacher, horseplay, and conversations with peers. The technique yields a class attentiveness score which is simply the percent of plusses over a period of a given duration. We typically did 10 sweeps in a fifteen minute period and 15 in a twenty minute session. We found we were easily able to monitor the attentiveness of eight children in each teaching session. Inter-subjective reliability was extremely high, never dropping below .90 for any given session.

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As a supplement to these data we recorded instances of physical contacts displayed by the children in the four original classes. (Time pressure did not permit these data to be collected in the two additional classes.) All acts of hitting, pushing, yelling, pulling, or wrestling (including "play" fights) were recorded for four twenty-minute play and independent work periods in each type of class. (Affectionate acts such as hugging and hand-holding were not counted.) A count was made for each such act, the sex of the child involved also being noted. Reliability for this measure never fell below .95.

Classroom cohesion As may be recalled, our definition of cohesion is the traditional one - the attractiveness of a group for its members. We measured this through observation of the children's interaction patterns, using a time sampling technique devised by the authors. Three boys and three girls (later four and four as the technique was mastered) were randomly sampled for observation on each visit.3 Approximately every minute a sweep was made of the children and for each child it was noted whether the child was verbally interacting with: a boy (B), a girl (G), the teacher (T), or no one (blank). Reliability for these measures was again very high, never falling below .91 for a given session. Because the structured teaching sessions did not permit free-flowing student-student interaction the technique was used exclusively with free play and independent work sessions.

Results The ensuing presentation of data is divided into three sections - teacher-student interaction, deviance patterns, and cohesion. In each of these sections the same format is followed. We first compare the two original immersion classes with the two original regular classes. The data for the two classes of each type are combined for purposes of presentation. We then compare the additional immersion class with the additional regular class in order to gauge the overall consistency and generalizability of our results. As these latter classes were observed only after Christmas of the school year, it seemed important to separate them from the other four groups in the analysis so as to control to some extent the time variable.

Teacher-student interaction The major question to be answered in this section is the following: how different are our two sets of teachers in teaching style? To this end we gathered

3. Prior to each visit, we drew four numbers from a table of random numbers for girls and four for boys. At the start of each observation session each child was assigned a number based upon the order of entry into the classroom (e.g., first boy - 1; third girl - 3). Those children

having the pre-selected numbers were observed for that day.

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three measures of teacher style - extent of instrumentality, extent of symmetry and extent of personalization. Tables 2 and 3 present these data for formal teaching sessions and free play and independent work sessions respec- tively.

Our a priori assumption was that the immersion program would have fairly strong effects on the nature of teacher-student interaction. The goal of attempting to educate very young children in a language not their own was expected to require a major teaching adjustment of a kind not to be found in regular kindergarten classrooms.

We were rather surprised, then, to find that the two types of classes were more similar on our measures than they were different. Looking first at the formal teaching sessions (Table 2), all of the classes are characterized by a relatively high percentage of instrumental teaching behavior (mostly questioning and information giving). These ranged from 67 percent to 88 percent of all teacher communications in the observed periods. Further, the sessions are all relatively low in student-initiated teacher communications, which ranged from 16 percent in the additional immersion class to 28 percent in the additional regular class. Finally, with one exception, all of the teachers were relatively similar in the extent to which they interacted with individual children as opposed to the group as a whole. (The range here is from 51 percent in the additional regular class to 67 percent in the original regular classes.) The original immersion teacher, however, is clearly different on this dimension, displaying only 33 percent individual-directed teacher communications. (When compared with her regular counterpart (67 percent) we obtain a level

Table 2. Teacher communication in formal teaching sessions (in percentages).


Immersion (2-20 Regular (2-20 Immersion(2-20 Regular (2-20 minute periods) minute periods) minute periods) minute periods)

Extent of instrumentality:

Communications which were 67 69 81 88 instrumental Extent of symmetry

Student-initiated 18 21 16 28 communications Extent ofpersonalization: Individual-directed 33 67 57 51 communications N (total number of teacher (127) (111) (140) (137) communications)

* p < .001 two-tailed.

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of significance beyond the .001 level.)4 Her lessons consisted largely of lec- turing type behavior, with some limited questioning of the children on the content of her presentation.

Turning to the free play and independent work periods (Table 3) the same patterns are evident - i.e., relatively high similarity among the teachers with the exception of the original immersion instructor. These sessions, in sharp contrast to the more formal ones, are characterized by a relatively high degree of teacher-student symmetry. That is, the children initiate interaction for the teacher more often than she does for them. (The percent of student-initiated teacher communications varies from a low of 51 percent for the original regular teacher to 70 percent for the additional immersion teacher. This latter teacher is significantly different from her immersion counterpart on this dimension - p < .05). Further, the degree of personalization is considerably higher in these sessions, ranging from 86 percent to 97 percent of all teacher communications. It is surprising that instrumental-type contacts still dominate the classroom interaction in unstructured free play and independent work sessions, with a range of 63 percent in the additional immersion class to 86 percent in the original immersion class. This relatively

Table 3. Teacher communication in free play and independent work sessions (in percentages).1



Extent of instrumentality: Communications which were 86 66 63 69 instrumental Extent of symmetry Student-initiated 58 51 70 53 communications Extent ofpersonalization: Individual-directed 86 95 97 88 communications N (total number of teacher (170) (258) (153) (120) communications)

1. In kindergarten, these two are virtually indistinguishable activities. They produced very similar teacher-student interaction

patterns except for the greater percentage of instrumental interaction during seat work periods. They are hence combined

for presentation purposes. * p < .01 two-tailed. ** p < .05 two-tailed.

4. Some of the other regular-immersion differences in this table are no doubt also statistically significant due to the large number of observations made. We are only interested, however, in reporting significance for what we feel are substantial differences (i.e., differences of at least 15 percent between the two types of classes).

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deviant instrumentality score of 86 percent belongs to the same teacher who was less individually directed in her formal period interactions. This is consistent with the more impressionistic view of the various observers that this particular teacher attempted to run a fairly "tight" classroom.

In sum, we have presented data showing generally high similarity between our additional immersion and regular teacher on our three dimensions of teacher style. Our original immersion teacher, however, appears much more of a structured type of teacher than her regular counterpart, which will be taken into account in our interpretation of the study's findings.5

Classroom deviance A well-established finding in the educational research literature is the greater overall compatibility of girls than boys with the elementary school experience. Girls are more successful academically and, as well, are far less likely to exhibit anti-social behavior (Maccoby, 1966; Maccoby and Jacklin, 1974; Boocock, 1980; Bardwick, 1971; Richer, 1979). It seemed important, then, to separate out the two sexes in presenting our data for each type of classroom. Table 4 presents attentiveness scores by sex and type of classroom. Table 5 does the same for acts of physical contact.

We had predicated lower deviance in the immersion classes, a prediction which is clearly negated by our data. Regarding the attentiveness data, the six relevant comparisons (attentiveness scores for boys, girls and the total

Table 4. Attentiveness rates for formal teaching sessions (in percentages).



Boys attentive 75 80 63 78 N (total number male (128) (112) (80) (154) observations) Girls attentive 75 81 75 79 N (total number female (128) (112 (80) (154) observations) Total attentiveness 75 80 69 79 N (total number of (256) (224) (160) (308) observations)

* p < .05 one-tailed.

5. Our confidence in the reliability of these teacher-student interaction findings is reinforced by their consistency with previous classroom research. By and large, teachers, whatever the program they are engaged in seem to be highly instrumental, asymmetrical, and group-oriented as opposed to individually-oriented. (See Adams and Biddle, 1970; Hoetker and Ahlbrand, 1969; Jackson, 1968; Kounin, 1970; Dreeben, 1973; Martin, 1976.)

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Table 5. Number of acts of physical contact by sex (play and independent work periods only).

Immersion Regular 4-20 minute periods 4-20 minute periods

Observed Expected Observed Expected

Boys 49 29 21 13 Girls 9 29 5 13 Total 58 42 26 42

Total X2 = 12.2; p < .01 Sex differences, immersion class X2 = 27.4; p < .001 Sex differences, regular class X2 = 10.0; p < .01

class by type of program) indicate higher deviance in the immersion classes. Although only one of these comparisons is statistically significant (63 percent vs. 78 percent - p < .05) the others are without exception in the opposite direction suggested in our first hypothesis. This finding is particularly surprising since these children had significantly more pre-school than their regular counterparts (Table 1), were less likely to be defined as "emo- tional" or "behavioral" problems, and would thus be expected to be more pre- pared for the kindergarten experience. Finally, there is virtually no difference between the sexes on the attentiveness measure.

When we turn to the data on acts of physical contact, the higher deviance in immersion classes comes out much more clearly. In all, 84 acts of physical contact were observed in the four original classes. Of these, we observed 58 such acts in the immersion classes and only 26 in the regular classes. In addi- tion, this measure of deviance produced the expected boy-girl difference. In both types of classes boys were significantly more likely than girls to partici- pate in physical type interaction.

The above findings are very consistent with the observers' general im-

pressions of greater restlessness and boredom in the immersion classes. It was clear that, at least in this first year of the program, the teachers were hard-pressed to maintain the same level of social control apparent in the regular classes. The two general goals of communicating only in French and maintaining classroom order were often in conflict. We shall engage in a more general discussion of these deviance findings in the last section of this paper.

Classroom cohesion Our overall impression while observing the various classes was that there was a greater amount of inter-child cooperation in the immersion classes. This was most evident to us when the teacher spoke to a child in French and he was unable to understand her. At this point it was quite common to observe a

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second child translating the teacher's words into English and conveying them to his bewildered peer: "She means what day is it," or "She wants you to put the little square on the side," or "Take it over there, Alex, over there." Indeed, as the immigrant literature led us to expect, the peer group seemed to act in many instances as a buffer between the child and the teacher, aiding him in coping with a fairly uncertain environment. These relatively impressionistic observations led us to expect that our more systematic data would yield strong confirmation of our second hypothesis, i.e., higher levels of cohesion in the immersion classes. Table 6 presents these data for our four groups of classes.

Table 6. Cohesiveness in free play and independent work periods (in percentages).



Cross sex interactions 32 34 45 17 N (total number of (91) (97) (108) (86) interactions) Total interactions 35 36 44 27 N (total number of (260) (268) (248) (320) observations)

* p < .01 one-tailed

The data reveal no difference at all in these measures for the four original classes but relatively strong and statistically significant differences for the two classes added after Christmas. These latter differences are in the expected direction, with the immersion class showing a total cohesion score of 45 percent and a cross-sex interaction percentage of 44 percent. This com- pares with only 27 percent and 17 percent on these two measures in the regular class.

Our failure to find cohesion differences in the four original classes is related, we think, partly to the nature of our measures and partly to what we believe to be an interaction effect between teacher style, immersion, and class cohesion. Firstly, we operationalized cohesion in terms of the frequency of child-child contacts rather than the content of their interaction, a perhaps more salient aspect. The greater amount of mutual helping behavior in which children engaged in the immersion classes was not picked up by our particular cohesion measure. We are quite convinced that if we utilized a measure which captured this cooperative dimension, our cohesion difference would be much clearer.

Secondly, it is reasonable to assume that the more "structured" teaching style of the original immersion teacher could impede the development of peer

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relations, particularly with young children. Indeed, we often observed this teacher curtailing the interaction of children with one another, a phenomenon she essentially viewed as disruptive. (See also Larkin, 1975, who finds a strong inverse relationship between use of teacher power and peer cohesion in senior elementary grades.) We have, then, two variables working in opposite directions - the teacher's style depressing child-child interaction and the linguistic milieu fostering it. The net effect, we suggest, is that these cancel each other out and we find no cohesion differences in our four original classes. Although this completely ad hoc explanation is less than satisfactory, it must suffice pending further work in this area.

Discussion It is clear that our findings of higher rates of deviance in the French immersion classes must be reconciled with our original hypothesis which predicted lower rates for these groups. As may be recalled, this prediction was derived from the immigrant literature which reported lower crime rates among recent arrivals to a host society. It was argued that because of the urgency of learning the language, high initial conformity to establishment norms would be the case. It seems, however, that this process was not operative among immersion children. It was generally the case that they were more restless than their regular counterparts, a phenomenon reflected most clearly in the

greater frequency of physical contacts, i.e., rough-housing behavior. A primary reconciliation lies, we think, in our failure to consider certain

key structural differences between the immigrant situation and the immersion context. Specifically, the immigrant groups are typically minority group members attempting to learn a majority group's language. Further, the

learning process is usually carried out in the language of the majority group. In contrast, the French immersion situation in Canada typically involves a

majority group (Anglophone children) attempting to learn a minority lan-

guage (French) in the minority language (French). Variation in majority and minority language of students, language of in-

struction and language to be learned has, we expect, important consequences for both the motivation to learn the language and for the degree of decorum in the language-learning situation. In the case of immigrant groups, there is a relatively high degree of urgency in language acquisition because of the necessity to negotiate (e.g., for jobs, for material goods) with the majority group. Furthermore, conformity to the norms of the majority group is likely to be high because this group has control of the resources which immigrants require to survive. The immigrant analogy does not fit the French immersion situation because the students are already members of the majority. Thus, learning a second language assumes less instrumental importance. Indeed, it is only in the school context itself that our Anglophone children are expected to utilize French, and then only when conversing with the teacher herself.

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When children spoke to one another they invariably did so in English, with no admonition from the teacher. Because our Anglophone students are not under the same kind of pressure with regard to learning French there is little of a motivational nature to offset the difficulty entailed in attempting to understand and communicate in a second language. The restlessness we observed is a reflection of this difficulty.

Studies on deviance and control in classroom situations show that individual rewards to children (e.g., tokens, approval of appropriate behavior) increase conformity to classroom norms (Bushell et al., 1968; Ward and Baker, 1968; Drabman and Lahey, 1974; Litow and Pumroy, 1975). Our finding of different teaching styles between the two types of teachers, specifically the far greater degree of personalization or individually-directed communications to the children during the formal teaching sessions indicates that the factor may have influenced the degree of deviance and conformity in the two types of classes. Since the deviance measures were taken during the formal sessions only and the extent of personalization differed significantly in these formal sessions (Table 2) there is evidence for a direct effect of teaching style on the degree of deviance.

Although the differences in attentiveness between immersion and regular classes were small, with only one significant difference out of six (Table 4), the second deviance indicator - physical contact (hitting, horseplay) - differed significantly between the regular and immersion students, with far more physical contact in the latter group (Table 5). Since the original French immersion teacher was far more explicitly discipline-oriented than her regular counterpart, her style may have contributed to the differences in the physical contact measure. (See also Hamblin, 1971 on the positive relationship between aggression and close supervision.) Unfortunately, we did not collect data which would provide more direct evidence concerning this issue, but our impressions based upon many visits to her classes are that there was a far more authoritarian component in her teaching in terms of both explicit disapproval and the threat of disapproval for non-conformity than there was in the other classes.

The finding of more deviance in French immersion classes than in regular classes, despite the fact that the children had family backgrounds and pre-school experiences which would predict the opposite, we feel merits further research. More thought must be given to research design, since at this point, it is difficult to conclude with assurance that our findings are due to the effects of French immersion rather than to the effects of teaching style or to some interaction of these factors. To ascertain independent effects of French immersion, we might consider assuring equivalent styles in terms of individual reinforcement of students, rates of disapproval and other discipli- nary activity by the teachers prior to our data collection on deviance and cohesion. Furthermore, data on individual students, especially regarding who

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deviates and degree of comprehension of the language of instruction would provide an opportunity to ascertain whether or not deviance is related to ca- pacity to understand what is going on in class. Such research would allow us to make much more refined statements about the processes whereby immersion settings effect behavior.

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Documents

French Immersion and Classroom Behavior