Longitudinal studies of twelve second/foreign English, French, and Arabic classrooms across proficiencies and methodologies contrasted immersive (L2-only) versus non-immersive pedagogies. Comparisons of assignment scores revealed little/no differences, suggesting a limited impact of classroom language use on learning outcomes, a finding with implications for ideologically charged debates over immersive L2 teaching/learning.
Contemporary theories of language pedagogy have advocated almost exclusive second language (L2) use in language classrooms (Ellis & Shintani, 2014). The need for input, output, and interaction in the classroom notwithstanding, this 'monolingual' view of immersive pedagogy (Hall & Cook, 2012) has drawn criticism. From a 'multicompetence' perspective on second language acquisition (Cook & Wei, 2016), which considers all known languages to constitute a single system of knowledge, and a 'translanguaging' view of education (e.g. Garcia, Johnson & Selzter, 2017), defined as use of "multiple discursive practices' in the education of emergent bilinguals, the goal of foreign/second language teaching/learning should be developing bi/multilingualism, with proficient, flexible use of multiple languages (Creese & Blackledge, 2010). However, the issue of immersive versus non-immersive approaches has been labeled "the most important theoretical and pedagogic question facing both the research and practitioner communities today" (Macaro 2014:10).
A series of longitudinal studies of twelve second/foreign language classrooms in English, French, and Arabic quasi-experimentally examined whether strategic use of learners' native (L1) or other languages facilitated L2 acquisition. Learners of English participated in intact classrooms, ranging in proficiency from CEFR-A2 to C1, while learners of French and Arabic were all pre-A1 beginners studying in lab settings. Two thirds of the classes employed a between-participant control-intervention design, while four classrooms employed a mixed between-within-participant control-intervention design. Analyses of assignment scores across these diverse contexts indicated some superiority for the non-immersive pedagogy, but generally a lack of statistically significant differences between conditions. Thus, whether the teacher and/or learners made exclusive use of the L2 or included use of other languages up to as much as 75% of the classroom discourse appeared to make little difference to learning outcomes. Results will be discussed in relation to the ideologically charged debate over immersive second language teaching/learning (Hall & Cook, 2012).
