The suitability of core French for recently arrived English as a second language adolescent immigrants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Ontario, recently arrived English as a second language (ESL) immigrant students are frequently excluded from participating in the Grade 9 core French program, which is obligatory in principle for all secondary school students. I designed a mixed-method study to explore whether this practice, where it occurs, is well founded. First, through a survey of the secondary principals and guidance heads of a large urban southern Ontario school board, I examined the present practices of inclusion of ESL students in core French. Second, I compared the French proficiency of three, groups of secondary students: recently arrived ESL adolescents, multilingual Canadian-born students and unilingual Canadian-born students. Third, this study examined the contributions the ESL participants brought to the French-learning context by means of participant journals, participant and parental interviews. The survey of the principals and guidance heads revealed that French was considered an optional course for ESL students. The French proficiency measures, however, demonstrated the ESL students' ability to be successful in core French. French proficiency was measured using a multi-skills test consisting of a multiple choice listening test, three reading tasks, two writing tasks, a dictation and three oral tasks. The ESL group outperformed the other groups in one writing task and in both the reading and listening test components. They also outperformed the unilingual group on one section of the speaking test and the multilingual group on another section of the speaking component. There were no significant differences found among the groups for the other test components: the dictation, the second writing section or the final speaking component. The qualitative findings reveal that the ESL participants were confident in their ability to learn French. This confidence was founded in their prior successful language-learning experiences. Moreover, the ESL participants expressed satisfaction in their progress in learning French after one semester of study. Their positive affect was grounded in their view of multilingualism that tolerates and celebrates different levels of competence in multiple languages. In addition, they attributed value to learning French as one of the official languages of Canada.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".