University level immersion: Students' perceptions of language activities

Abstract

This article first presents a brief historical overview of immersion and a summary of research at the university level as well as the qualitative methodology used in our present research. It then describes the results of our study on immersion pedagogy at the post-secondary level: participants included 22 immersion students registered in four lower- and higher-level adjunct classes at the University of Ottawa in Canada, two in psychology and two in political sciences. Through focus group discussions these students described the different language activities and gave their perceptions of the usefulness of the activities for mastering both the content of the discipline course and the required language skills as well as how enjoyable they found them. Results reveal that students did mostly the same language activities based on reading, listening, writing, speaking, and vocabulary building. Students distinguished between the usefulness of an activity for mastering content course material and for learning the second language. They may or may not have enjoyed doing the activity regardless of how useful they found it. In general the lower-level students tended to be slightly more positive about their activities than the higher-level students.