Resumen de The bilingual interactions of late partial immersion French students during a history task

Margaret Mary Gearon

• Task-based learning has been recommended in immersion classes in order to provide relief from the usual teacher-fronted lessons and increase the opportunities for student output. This paper presents one aspect of the data collected during the on-going evaluation of a late partial immersion French programme in an Australian school. It presents the bilingual interactions of two small groups of 14-year-old students working collaboratively to complete a problem-solving task for a History unit, requiring them to design a new village in the middle ages. The analysis demonstrates that these students do not use French only for the set task, but engage in other social uses of the language as well as using English for specific interactions related to completing the set task. In terms of sociocultural theory, one pair uses French as a mediating tool to negotiate and scaffold the completion of the set task and to develop their personal relationship with each other. The other small group uses both languages primarily to progress through the set task, although in a couple of short instances, one of the students digresses and tries to engage the others in a non-task directed interaction.