The suitability of French immersion education for students with reading disabilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study reported outcomes for students with reading disabilities (RDs) in early total French immersion (n = 17) relative to students with RDs in the regular English program (n = 17) on measures of academic achievement, English reading, behaviour, and perceived social acceptance. French immersion is a widespread, alternative education program where majority language speakers are taught the regular curriculum through a second language. Early program evaluations revealed that students suffered no cognitive, linguistic, or academic delay as a result of learning through French. However, these findings were largely limited to normally-achieving, non-disabled students. The few studies of at-risk students in French immersion have been inconclusive. Although some studies have found evidence that at-risk students did more poorly in immersion than core English, and argued that they should be transferred out of the immersion program immediately, other studies have found no differences between at-risk students in immersion and core English programs and argued that they should be permitted to remain in immersion. Consequently, parents and teachers have been left to make placement decisions without empirical support. In this study, students with RDs were compared to each other and to a matched sample of non-disabled control students (n = 34). Groups were matched on age, gender, socioeconomic status, and IQ. Participants attended Grades 4, 5 and 6 and were tested in English. Students with RDs in French immersion performed equivalently to students with RDs in core English on all measures. They showed comparable achievement in spelling, arithmetic, phonological awareness, and reading comprehension. They were not rated by parents or teachers as having more behaviour problems, and reported similar self-perceptions of social acceptance. Comparisons were also made between students with RDs in immersion and students with RDs who transferred out of the immersion program. These explor
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 | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".