Opposing arguments
- Many researchers have reported that immersion students’ comprehension skills (reading and listening) in French are less advanced than their production skills (speaking and writing) and that immersion students seldom attain native-like grammatical accuracy or idiomatic usage and they often have a limited range of vocabulary and pragmatic competence in French even after 10 to 12 years participation in immersion (Genesee & Lindholt-Leary, p.10)
- Although nearly 2.8 million Canadians said in the last census that they use more than one language at work, most Canadian jobs outside the public service still don’t require bilingual fluency. (Baluja & Bradshaw, 2012)
- The Fraser Institute’s January study showed taxpayers foot an annual bill of $2.4-billion for federal and provincial bilingual services. (Baluja & Bradshaw, 2012)
- Bilingual children often perform worse than monolingual chidlren in linguistic tasks, especially vocabulary (Barac and Bialstok 2012).
- Using research done by Barac and Bialstok (2012) English monolingual and Spanish bilingual outperform French bilingual children in the Mean and Standard Deviation for Receptive Vocabulary (PPVT-III), and the Standardized Score for the Clinical Evalation of Language Fundamentals (CELF). These finding either promote monolingual education or bilingual education with Spanish as the secondary language. This focus is mainly on developing children’s educational abilities- especially as learning Spanish or French helps students to learn the other.
- Negative attitudes toward language learning can reduce learner motivation and harm language learning (Merisuo-Storm 2007). This is significant in Canada , where tensions and conflict arises within provinces, specifically Quebec and the Western provinces, concerning language.
- In 2003, Canada started The Next Act which has a two goals: to double the number of high school students with working knowledge of their second official language from 24- 50%; and to increase the number of French-speaking pupils going to French school from 68-80%. (Cardinal 2008). This policy has not been reached a decade later