Preservice Models

Existing pre-service immersion teacher education programs differ, depending on a range of contextual factors including: societal and educational objectives of the program, target immersion language, the target student–teacher population, instructional time allocated to the L1 and/or the L2, and the university level at which immersion teacher education commences. Information in Figure 2 is by no means an exhaustive summary, though it serves as a representational cross section of extant immersion teacher education models.

Models of Immersion Teacher Education (ITE)

As shown in Figure 2, models for ITE can be fundamentally divided into those that are preservice or initial immersion teacher education programs and those that are in-service or professional development teacher education programs. The former comprises student teachers who have no professional education apart from perhaps secondary school. The latter consists of participants who have already gained some expert knowledge or expertise in a complementary field (for example, generalist primary for L1 children, foreign language education, or even a discipline subject area such as mathematics, science or history. The needs of these individuals will differ from those of preservice student teachers, since they usually only need to gain competence in a set number of additional areas in which they find themselves deficient (usually one or more of L2 proficiency, content knowledge, and pedagogical knowledge). Preservice student teachers need to acquire expert knowledge in the full range of competencies that make up the core skills of an immersion teacher, in addition to proficiency in the immersion language. The differing nature and needs of immersion student-teachers will thus dictate the length of any program of study.

In 1985, Obadia noted that of 47 faculties of education in Canada only 16 offered some type of program, subject or module specifically geared towards immersion teacher training and that of these the majority were simply ad hoc add-on courses “qui vient s'ajouter à la formation classique de l'enseignant” (that typically reflect a classic teacher preparation model) (1985, p. 416). By 1993, this number had risen to 23 (Martin, Obadia, & Rodriquez, 1993), and by 2003 the number of faculties of education worldwide offering some type of immersion training rose in excess of 50. However, recently some immersion teacher education programs have also been terminated for lack of student numbers and funding cuts (Karen Johnson, personal communication, November 2003).

Models of ITE may vary in length, clientele, and delivery mode. For example, the ITE model established in the Faculté Saint-Jean at the University of Alberta caters primarily to student teachers who are native Francophone speakers. The Faculté itself is a French-medium department and the program is delivered in native-speaker mode. However, other models, primarily those ITE programs established as add-ons, use the L1 as the medium and mode of delivery, even though these student teachers will graduate and teach immersion through an L2. A third model includes programs that use both the L1 and the L2, where course content is delivered through the medium of both languages in native-speaker mode. An example of this model is the ITE program at Simon Fraser University. Last, there are models that deliver the content of the ITE program through the L2, through immersion mode itself. Examples of such programs primarily exist where the majority of client student teachers only speak the immersion language as their L2, such as the Language and Culture Initial Teacher Education: Primary (LACITEP) model at Central Queensland University, Australia (Erben, Cox, & Phillips, 1993), and the Reciclatge model in Spain²

In-Service Models

In-service models of immersion teacher education are primarily framed by the local conditions and needs of immersion teachers, schools, districts, and state authorities. Research in in-service teacher education reveals that, to be effective, inservice models need to be ongoing, relevant, collaborative, building on the prior strengths of participants, allowing participants to reorganize their existing pedagogical schemata, as well as being practical, conceptually based and didactically driven. From early on, a number of successful immersion in-service programs have been documented. One of the earliest (Brine & Shapson, 1989) was an exploratory study of a 12 month model specifically designed for experienced teachers with no immersion background and low L2 proficiency. Results showed that participants' major concerns (linguistic, financial, family, employment, and practica) by the end of the program were significantly reduced and that their effectiveness in L2 oral expression and knowledge of immersion methodology had significantly increased.

More recently, many different types of in-service provision for immersion teachers have been realized. In response to ongoing research into the professional development needs of immersion teachers (see Day & Shapson, 1996a), two organizations in particular merit particular mention. The Canadian Association of Immersion Teachers (http://acpi.scedu.umontreal.ca/) and the Center for Advanced Second Language Research at the University of Minnesota (http://carla.acad.umn.edu/) both host an array of in-service opportunities for immersion teachers. These include but are not limited to regular annual conferences, ongoing short- and longterm workshops/institutes, the publication of newsletters/journals, and the management of listservers and databases as well as the electronic storage of curriculum resources all specifically geared to immersion teachers. Lastly, a recent development in the advancement of professional development opportunities for immersion teachers is the creation of on-line courses for teachers, such as that developed by the Illinois Resource Center (http://www.dualu.org). Whether such inservice provision are effective remain open to investigation.

Effectiveness of Immersion Teacher Education Programs

Nuttall and Langham (1997) carried out an issues-based evaluation of a South African government initiative designed to improve EFL teacher education efforts in that country. The initiative, called the Molteno Project, aimed to establish and infuse English-medium teacher education programs in the principles and practices of learner-centered methodology as well as to develop suitable materials so that teachers are more fully equipped to teach through the medium of English. The study indicates that a cyclical process of classroom research, ongoing EFL professional development after graduation, and teacher-led materials development are important factors in guaranteeing the success of extensive ongoing EFL teacher training. A number of studies, however, have investigated the cognitive and linguistic benefits of such English-medium teacher education programs in various European EFL environments (Finland, Sweden, Ukraine) and found that even when starting from higher EFL proficiency levels, participants continue to achieve significant positive gains (Buchberger, 2000; Tarnopolsky, 1996).

For the most part, studies in Asia are descriptive in nature and focus on issues involving certification (Sadtono, 1995), program implementation (Shiozawa, 1993), and program effectiveness (Guefrachi & Troudi, 2000). Studies that have focused on EFL acquisition through immersion show mixed results. Other studies, however, indicate less success both in terms of the overall level of proficiency realized by student teachers and their ultimate ability to engage in English with their students in their future classrooms. In research conducted in Hong Kong, Johnson (1997) indicates that students' abilities to study effectively through English at the tertiary level remains in doubt. In another study, Lim Swee Eng, Gan, and Sharpe (1997) report that English-medium teacher education programs in Singapore do not necessarily provide future bilingual or English immersion teachers with the necessary communicative competence and confidence to act as suitable language models in the classroom. They suggest that English-medium teacher education programs need to focus on introducing more communicative methods of language teaching to improve the overall English language proficiency of student teachers.

Language Use and Interaction

In a 1998 study of elementary Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) learners, Takahashi found patterns of interactional variability arising as a result of goal-directed collaborative group activity. Takahashi discovered that learners' learning and behavior through social interaction in classroom environments were very much influenced by what the teacher did. In contrast, Erben (2001b) reveals that the regulatory behavior and strategic orientation of immersion student teachers in similar classroom-group environments are very much influenced, not by the lecturer or class facilitator, but by the quality of interaction itself, the ability to appropriate mediational means as they are introduced through collective scaffolding, and the willingness of group participants to share in and build a collective pedagogic capital. This suggests that immersion student teachers' level of regulatory contribution to dialogic engagement is not only task-specific but, more important, goal-specific and dynamic-specific, that is, indicative of the level of collaborative willingness that participants within a task engage with each other or use mediated tools to help each other.

In 2001, Erben examined immersion student teachers' L2 interactions during microteaching planning and debriefing sessions (see LACITEP model at Central Queensland University, http://handbook.cqu.edu.au/pages/ugprgmcq51.thml). He found that the L2 used by student teachers initially represented a subgoal subordinated to the total activity of microteaching planning and execution. In fact, it was the L1 that in many groups stimulated the collective forming process. The L1 was used as a mediating linguistic tool to establish group roles, construct and confirm referential perspective, edit new information as well as to negotiate rules of participation, moderate the pace of interaction, and manage collaborative input. For an immersion teacher education setting, this is particularly poignant. In many of the first product-oriented immersion studies carried out in Canada during the 1970s, it was observed that children at the initial stages of their L2 immersion experience overwhelmingly used their L1 to negotiate the curriculum. As the children became more proficient, more L2 was used. However, this situation reversed itself somewhat in secondary school immersion settings where students progressively used more L1. This was not because of low L2 proficiency, but because of adolescent peer pressure and conformity. Like their Canadian early immersion antecedents, the university immersion student teachers in this Australian study initially used more English in the early part of their program, since they did not have the linguistic skills to talk about their microteaching experiences (Erben, 1995). This does not suggest that no L2 was used; on the contrary. What became evident was that the student teachers used the L1 to master the L2, talk about the L2, and construct L2 teacher scripts for their JFL classroom. They used Japanese within discursive events in which their Japanese knowledge sufficed. When it did not, assistance was either given by a more knowledgeable peer, or the novice student-teacher resorted to code switching or to the L1 in its entirety to maintain the momentum of the group's work.

In an ethnographic study within the LACITEP immersion program, Erben and Bartlett (1998) found that, in the context of developing an L2 repertoire to talk about their JFL teaching, student teachers were eventually able to use professional terminology to describe and make sense of their experience. The introduction of a professionally oriented discourse within content-based courses helped student teachers to construct critical and more different ways to understand their actions. In turn, this led student teachers to think and act in different ways, or as Freeman calls it, to “reconstruct practice” (1996, p. 735).

Practicum Experiences

Erben (2001b) carried out a six-month case study using a sociocultural theoretical framework (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988; Wells, 1999). He investigated how immersion student teachers engaged in collective-group curriculum planning during a school-based practicum came to construct L2 pragmatic and sociolinguistic knowledge as well as pedagogic knowledge of immersion teaching. Erben found many complex modes of social interaction among the immersion student teachers. Among others, student-teachers (1) frame their roles in learning, (2) did not recycle their notions of pedagogy and L2 classroom use, but jointly reconstructed new repertoires for engaging in immersion teaching, and (3) became more adept at navigating their regulatory orientations through the ongoing changes in the linguistic complexities of the content of interaction. On the one hand, L2 use was determined by the behavior of the more knowledgeable peer in group microteaching activities, and on the other hand, it was also determined by the receptivity of each individual student teacher to appropriate the use of mediational tools such as the L2. Both factors helped the student teachers to make sense of their engagement with the microteaching context of their learning as well as to understand and control the processes of such engagement itself.

Erben (2001b) outlines a number of possible ways to enhance the collaborative nature of practica such that immersion student teachers have enhanced opportunities to collectively regulate their microgenetic growth, to establish multiple connections of intersubjectivity with peers, and to (re)construct as well as appropriate knowledges different to the ones legitimatized in current practice (see Figure 3). The conception is based on a notion of continuous strategic engagement. This is defined as a situation in which a student teacher's engagement with learning is never carried out alone, but is organized around a collective of peers who themselves may be at various levels of regulation. Collective engagement may occur at differing levels (for example, in pairs, in groups, in larger groupings or cohorts and in class configurations), with the guiding principle being that a student teacher's learning within a practicum context never takes place in isolation and that every student teacher has the discursive space to collectively construct L2 and pedagogic understandings, to regulate others as well as be regulated by others. To overcome the possible effects of cursory collaborative work routines becoming established within groupings, it is suggested that a more knowledgeable peer or expert, from a higher year level, take on the role of mentor to facilitate and to guide productive collaborations.

Overcoming the Isolating Student-teacher Practicum (A group-based field experience model of practice teaching)

Effects of Mediating Instruction through Technology within Immersion Programs

Of the many so-called innovations in the language education industry over the past 30 years, only two innovations have been credited with providing a unique contribution to the field. One is immersion pedagogy (Krashen, 1984), and the other is computer-mediated online learning (Warschauer, 1998). However, while the benefits of immersion education and the uses of technology in education have been well documented, research into computer-mediated communication and computermediated pedagogy in immersion settings remain at best scant. Erben (1999, 2002) provides a contextualized account of the linguistic and pedagogic changes which occur in a university teacher education immersion classroom (see LACITEP model) when instruction is networked through the medium of one particular online technology, namely audiographics. Audiographic technology is a network-based media tool that facilitates multimedia conferencing, data conferencing, and visual conferencing in the classroom. Providing a two-way audio and two-way virtual–visual computer link, it allows users to learn interactively, and store and/or send images and information (still video images, documents or pictures, CD ROM images, compressed audio or video clips) from separate computers linked over a network. It enables linked sites to share screens in such a way that any information written or typed is immediately seen at all remote sites. Linked sites are thus able to share software tools such as Windows and use these interactively. This work characterizes the linguistic and pedagogic adaptations in the classroom as student teachers develop from other- to self-regulated activity.

Figure 4 illustrates the levels of use of a range of electronic media, including e-mail, video conferencing, audiographics, and the like used in the LACITEP degree program. The main component of the study consisted of tracking one third-year LACITEP class over a seven-week period where (1) student teachers were taught a unit (six hours in total divided into 30-minute segments and delivered over a three week period) from the course “Teaching, Learning & Planning” through audiographics with the class being in ‘line-of-sight’, and where (2) the same student teachers were then taught a subsequent unit from the course “Teaching, Learning & Planning” (eight hours in total divided into thirty minute segments and delivered over a four-week period) where delivery was networked through audiographics and delivered over different sites. Classes were observed and videotaped, and the teacher and student teachers were interviewed at various stages throughout the study. The data were collated in terms of critical incidences of instruction and analyzed for their significance and effects on linguistic and pedagogical processes.

Delivery of Total Curriculum through Immersion and Use of Electronic Media as a Percentage of Subject Contact Time

Erben (2001b) noted that there was a narrowing of the range of symbolic cues in mediated interaction. This means that the degree of reciprocity and interpersonal exchange was less than one would observe in face-to-face interactions. Because there was no face-to-face access to a wider range of symbolic cues and reference systems that are known/learned/understood due to physical presence or context; teachers and individual student teachers had to “work” to produce cues (pedagogic and/or linguistic) that required amplification or reduction.

Amplification refers to those classroom discursive practices that, because of the nature of the mediated interaction at a distance, participants need to modify in terms of increasing the production, frequency, and/or intensity of cues, signs, and behaviors in order to achieve the same desired effect if the same cue, sign or behavior were produced in a face-to-face classroom. On the other hand, reduction refers to cues, signs, and other discursive practices that, due to their mediation through audiographics, are diminished, abridged, or shortened in production, intensity or frequency when compared to the same practice in a regular face-to-face classroom. Over the seven-week period in which student teachers were observed, pedagogical and linguistic adjustments did not remain constant. In the beginning, many more instantiations of amplifications and reductions occurred because students and teachers alike attempted to adjust known classroom practices and routines to the requirements of engaging in learning and interaction through Japanese immersion that was mediated through audiographics. However, as classroom participants adapted to the use of audiographics, instructional processes came to be increasingly reconstructed in ways that represented a substantive shift away from how these processes occurred in face-to-face immersion classrooms.

Social Dimensions of Student Teachers' Interactions and the Professional Cultures of Immersion Teacher Education Programs

To better understand the various pedagogical attributes of postsecondary immersion endeavors in teacher education, Bartlett and Erben (1995) carried out a 12-month issues-based case study investigation of LACITEP, a four-year bachelor of education degree program through Japanese immersion in Australia (Erben, in press). According to Bartlett and Erben, the interpretation of immersion provided in the literature is largely a linguistic or sociolinguistic one. Far from being merely a linguistic bath, however, their study shows teacher education through immersion to be a multidimensional dialectic phenomenon. In terms of what a pre-service immersion teacher is actually immersed in, Bartlett and Erben identify four attributes characterized as language, culture, context, and content knowledge. By understanding the interplay of these four attributes as a process within different classroom environments, different learning experiences, different group dynamics, different microteaching experiences and subject contexts, Bartlett and Erben framed the outcomes and student achievement levels in the LACITEP immersion program through what might be called an immersion filter, shown in Figure 5.

Representation of an Immersion Filter in Teacher Education

Erben (2001a, 2001b) states that an immersion student teacher's cognitive growth is not guaranteed. Within the “situated” process of socialization into a community of JFL immersion practice, cognitive growth is framed by an individual's receptiveness, sensitivity towards and ability to manage those mediational means placed at his/her disposal. This might be by more knowledgeable peers through collective interaction or through interaction with the social setting per se. A more acute receptivity toward appropriating mediational means, a sensitivity toward identifying the quality of using such mediational means in terms of one's own microgenetic growth, and an ability to manage such means within interactional operations ultimately shape the extent of learning in the ZPD (see also Wells, 1999).