High School Choices: Comparing Representations of French Immersion and International Baccalaureate Diploma Programs in Nova Scotia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In response to growing concerns regarding the effectiveness and equity of French Second Language education in Canada (Barrett DeWiele & Edgerton, 2021), this research takes discourse as a point of entry to investigate students' choice to enrol in one of two programs in Nova Scotia public schools: French Immersion and the International Baccalaureate Diploma.Using the Discourse Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (Reisigl, 2017), French Immersion and International Baccalaureate program descriptions were examined.Program descriptions were extracted from the course selection handbooks of 11 Nova Scotia high schools offering both programs and these descriptions were analysed with the aim of understanding (1) how each program was constructed in the discourse, and (2) the evaluations and assumptions of school knowledge and social capital inherent in these constructions.The analysis considered patterns of intertextuality, textual prominence, and discursive strategies of nomination (i.e., synecdoche, deixis and nominalisation), predication (i.e., evaluative attributes and overlexicalisation) and argumentation.IBD program descriptions were found to contain more overt intertextual references, be more prominent textually, and to make greater use of argumentation schemes.Given the authoritative role of schools as trusted education institutions, the discursive constructions found in the program descriptions are arguably those which most influence students' and parents' decision making.The increased understanding of this decision making brought about by this research has the potential to inform policies aimed at increasing rates of French-English bilingualism amongst young Nova Scotian students.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".