Introduction

During the past quarter century in Canada, French immersion programs have firmly established themselves as viable and successful alternatives to traditional core French courses. Today there are immersion programs in all of Canada's provinces and territories and there are approximately three hundred thousand students enrolled in them. Depending on the location of the program, the students may be predominantly Anglophones from the majority language group who are learning French as a minority language, as, for example, in Toronto and Vancouver; they may be from an Anglophone community where French is the language spoken by the majority of the community, as, for example, in the original St. Lambert project conducted in Montreal; or they may be Anglophone students from an area where both French and English are widely spoken, as, for example, in the Ottawa area.

The original experimental nature of these programs has generated a great deal of research. Means of measuring receptive and productive French-language skills have been developed (e.g., Green & Lapkin, 1984; Hart, Lapkin & Swain, 1988; Lapkin & Swain, 1977) and used in outcome-based research, concerned in part with identifying strengths and weaknesses in the French of immersion students (e.g., Genesee, 1987; Harley, 1992; Harley & King, 1989; Harley & Swain, 1978, 1984; Lapkin, 1983, 1984; Swain, 1984; Swain & Lapkin, 1986), and the effects of program variables on student achievement (e.g., Hart, Lapkin & Swain, 1988, 1989a, 1989b).