French Immersion Programs And Students’ Social Attitudes: A Multidimensional Investigation

Abstract

This is a study of four groups of elementary school students and their attitudes toward 10 socially relevant concepts, e.g., “self”, “monolingual French Canadians”, “bilingual English Canadians”, etc. Two of the groups comprised grade five and six English-speaking Canadian students who had participated in either an “early” or a “late” French immersion program. For purposes of comparison, an otherwise comparable group of English-speaking Canadian students with no French immersion experience was included, along with a group of French-speaking Canadian students in a totally French- language school program. The paired dissimilarity ratings of the 10 concepts were subjected to multidimensional scaling analyses and analyses of variance. The results indicated that while language and ethnicity (French vs. English) was an important dimension along which all four groups judged social similarities, extensive experience with the other group’s language (as exemplified here in “early” French immersion experience) led to a reduction in the extensity of the language-ethnicity dimension, and in the differences perceived between self, one’s own ethno-linguistic group, and the relevant other ethno-linguistic group.

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