English as a Second Language in the Primary School

The New Brunswick Experiment

While immersion programmes may have some lessons for language teachers in the French school system, it is fairly clear that we cannot do the same thing. Although some European classes have been opened in which subjects such as history and geography are taught in a foreign language, these are in a minority, and, in any case are staffed by teachers who are not native speakers of the language and who have received no or little training in language teaching. (For an example of such a programme, see the page put up by the Lycée Jean Moulin at Forbach).

In the absence of a sufficient number of well-trained and linguistically competent teachers, is there another way of approaching language-teaching in a 'naturalistic' way? One experiment that may have pointers for us is to be found in another part of Canada - New Brunswick. Back in 1966, I wrote a series of e-mail posts to FLTeach which described and made some attempt to analyze this experiment.