The Role of Gender and Immersion in Communication and Second Language Orientations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Learning a second language (L2) in Cape Breton offers a unique challenge to students given that the southeastern portion of the island (where this study was conducted) is essentially unilingual (English). Despite Canada's reputation as a bilingual nation, nonimmersion students in this study would receive at the most only about an hour of second language speaking opportunities per day inside a classroom. However, in reality, the nonimmersion classroom tends to be structured so that emphasis is placed on grammar, and very little L2 conversation takes place. Contrast this with students in immersion programs, who are expected to use the second language inside and outside the classroom, both for instruction and for social interaction at school. Immersion programs have been praised for the greater advantages they offer students, and immersion students are often thought to be more proficient at using the L2 than nonimmersion students. At the time of this study, there had been no research that directly compared high school immersion and nonimmersion students from the same linguistic landscape on nonlinguistic language‐related outcomes, such as attitudes, orientations for learning, and communication affect. Such a comparison might have pedagogical implications, especially for teachers who provide little opportunity for actual L2 use. The present study examines the nonlinguistic outcomes of an immersion versus a nonimmersion program. The dependent variables included attitudes toward learning French, orientations for learning, willingness to communicate, communication anxiety, perceived communicative competence, and self‐reported frequency of communication in both English (L1) and French (L2). A qualitative section was included that asked students to describe some negative and positive experiences in speaking French and their reactions to these experiences. Compared with the nonimmersion students, immersion students indicated higher willingness to communicate, lower communication anxiety, higher perceived communicative competence, and more frequent communication only in the French language. Among the nonimmersion students, perceived competence was strongly correlated with willingness to communicate, but among the immersion students, communication anxiety correlated most strongly with willingness to communicate. The obtained gender differences indicated that male nonimmersion students showed the least positive attitudes toward learning French; female nonimmersion students showed higher endorsement of 3 of the 4 language learning orientations. The qualitative analysis revealed that negative experiences speaking French, while unpleasant for both immersion and nonimmersion students, may have actually enhanced their motivation. [The present article appeared in Language Learning, 50 (2), 2000, 311–341]
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".