French Immersion Challenges

Challenges of the French Immersion Classroom

In discussions with many French Immersion teachers we were told that teachers often struggle with how to teach from an inquiry stance because of the factor of French being most students' second language. Here are a few of the other reasons teachers shared with us:

• "I am not sure how to get started with inquiry"
• "I am curious, but unclear, about how to lay out Big Ideas and concepts for my students"
• " How do you do it?"
• "How do we put the learning back onto the students?"
• " How do I build the important vocabulary?"
• "I know that most teachers think that inquiry is project-based, but I'm hearing that this is not accurate?"

Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction uses an inquiry lesson design to allow students to be guided to discover the Big Ideas or conceptual understandings, but it is important to note that during some lessons teachers use deductive structure to teach factual knowledge and skills, which is the traditional method of explicit teaching using best practices.

When introducing vocabulary it is important to allow much of the vocabulary to be drawn from activities that engage students in their prior knowledge of the content. There are a variety of activities that can be used to build vocabulary. What is important is to involve students in the process of bringing meaningful and connected vocabulary from their own experiences, rather than passively remembering a list of terms and words that are disconnected from their own thinking. Building vocabulary through collaborative activities scaffolds the experience for all students. It gives them the tools to inquire at the conceptual level. Spending a large amount of time building the vocabulary will be beneficial and contribute to student success. In this unit, much of the acquisition of the vocabulary was taught during the Language Arts activities.

Lynn Erickson calls this SYNERGISTIC THINKING. It is an interactive thinking process between the lower levels and the conceptual levels of mental processing.

As students are asked to consider skills and factual knowledge through a conceptual lens and to arrive at a generalization (Big Ideas) statement that represents the skills and factual examples presented, they are thinking synergistically. (Erickson, Lanning, 2008, 2014)