Immersion schools: Wallace Lambert's legacy

In the early 1960s, a dozen parents in the South Shore Montreal suburb of St. Lambert sought out academic specialists in cognition and language learning at McGill, psychologist Wallace Lambert and neurologist Wilder Penfield. The result was an experiment that began at Margaret Pendlebury Elementary School in St. Lambert in 1965. The highly successful experiment led to the widespread introduction of French Immersion in Canada, and around the world, but its success was based on a number of key elements: parental support, the political environment, and the fact that French was easily accessible as a public language outside the school. Despite the success of the program, myths have persisted to the effect that immersion makes it harder for students to learn English. New myths have emerged, suggesting wrongly that immersion is inappropriate for immigrants to Canada, and that immersion programs are exclusively for elite students, and that immersion is the only way to master French as a second language. Second language learning has also become a priority in Quebec, with the introduction of a semester of intensive English for Grade 6 students in French-language schools. This has proven to be controversial for some, but has strong majority support from parents, who think their children have a much better chance at succeeding in life if they are bilingual.