Attitudes and Motivation in Second-Language Learning

The term 'additive bilingualism' to refer to the situation where an individual's first language is a societally dominant and prestigious one. It has typically been associated with positive social and cognitive characteristics of bilinguals, while subtractive bilingualism has typically been associated with negative social and cognitive characteristics. This chapter considers certain linguistic outcomes of French immersion education in an attempt to show how truly 'additive' the program has been. It examines aspects of immersion student's first language performance that indicate an enhancement of linguistic skills over those of unilingual English students. Four different measures of French proficiency were calculated for such features as verb, prepositional, and syntactic accuracy, lexical diversity and lexical uniqueness, accent, fluency, and discourse and strategic performance. The opinion essay was scored for number of words written, non homophonous grammatical errors, and a global judgement of 'good' writing involving two dimensions: complexity of sentence structure and phrasing, and incidence of spelling, grammatical, and syntactic errors.