Speaking (like the) French: The Success of a Three-Week Domestic Immersion Program

Abstract:Analyzing thirteen years of evaluations by students enrolled in a three-week intensive immersion course and comparing the paths students take after this immersion experience with those of students taking an equivalent semesterlong course, this paper argues that a home immersion program, as short as three weeks, can inspire students to overcome the discouragement that they may feel at the intermediate level, to pursue further study of the language by going abroad, and to major in French.


Speaking (like the) French:
The Success of a Three-Week Domestic Immersion Program by Christiane Métral and Janie Vanpée "Speaking (like the) French" was designed in 1993 to address the frustration that strikes too many students who feel that they plateau at an intermediate level of language acquisition.After the traditional sequence of three or four semesters of college language instruction, often following several years of study in high school, students may feel that their learning stagnates at the mid-intermediate level on the ACTFL scale, or B1 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR <coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Source/Framework_EN.pdf>).They lose interest in their initial goal of improving linguistic competence, and many abandon their studies in the language before they reach a higher level of mastery. 1 Yet students who manage to pass or bypass this low moment often go on to spend a year or semester studying abroad and regain their momentum to reach a greater level of fluency.Could a course be designed to counter the plateau effect?What kind of intermediate level course might re-motivate student interest by enabling them to surmount the period of stagnation and to reconnect with the language and culture?The January interterm at Smith College, a period students usually spend unengaged academically, offered an opportunity for an experiment.The proven success of the Middlebury summer language school's total immersion program, condensing two semesters of college-level language courses into seven to eight weeks, suggested a model for an interterm course that would likewise condense one semester into a three-week immersion. 2Such an intense immersion experience, albeit shorter than the Middlebury program, could serve multiple objectives.Not only might it allow students to progress more rapidly than during a semester course, therein addressing the problem of the "plateau effect," but it might also make that progress more visible and attractive to students and thus encourage them to continue their study of the language beyond the intermediate level.Could a three-week intense immersion experience lead students to "dream" in French?
Our starting point was primarily practical and pedagogical more than theoretical.Twenty-three years later and with sixteen years of detailed student evaluations, we can now say that our initial goals in creating this course were achieved.This affirmation is based on an analysis of thirteen years of evaluation surveys, when the course was taught between 1994 and 2011; from evaluations from subsequent years (2014-16); and a study of the patterns of course selection that students chose the semester and year following this immersive three-week course.Both these qualitative and quantitative findings show that most students renewed their enthusiasm for the study of French, and that a majority of them continued their studies in the language, by either studying abroad or majoring in French.Detailed comments from our students' end-of-course evaluations provide further evidence of the effectiveness of our pedagogical approach and the value of a short-term domestic immersion program within a college curriculum.Indeed, what was first an "experiment" has been fully integrated in our French Studies curriculum, with student demand often surpassing capacity.

Research on Immersion Programs
In the last twenty years a number of researchers in second language acquisition have tried to measure the benefits of study abroad on target language acquisition and, more specifically, to compare linguistic gains between formal classroom instruction on a college campus at home and the more holistic study abroad combination of formal study and language and cultural immersion.Yet, other than the research conducted on early immersion programs in primary schools, mostly in the context of bilingual education in Canada, there are few serious studies that focus on learning a second language/culture in an immersive context at home, and there were none when we first conceived "Speaking (like the) French" in 1993.Of the studies that have since been published, four are of particular relevance.Freed et al. compared the acquisition of fluency and communicative competence of twenty-eight students in three different learning contexts-a regular semester classroom language instruction, a semester study abroad and a seven-week domestic immersion program. 3Interestingly, the study reveals that students involved in the on-campus immersion program made the "greatest gains in oral fluency, despite the similar number of hours of classroom-based instruction for the two groups" (294).These unanticipated findings show that on several of the nine measured variables they performed better than the study abroad students.Students in the immersion context reported using French more outside of formal classes, in speaking and writing activities.In fact, the students in the study abroad semester program reported speaking more English than French on a weekly basis.In contrast, the students in the intensive immersion environment on campus reported using significantly more French than English during the seven-week program.
This study challenges the general belief that learners who spend time abroad in the L2 culture necessarily become more fluent.That said, there are many different study abroad programs, of various level of rigorousness, and it could be that programs that enforce a "target-language only" pledge may have a different measure of success.Nevertheless this study is important because it highlights the benefits, quality, and advantages of domestic immersion programs that extend contact hours with the target language to include co-curricular activities.
Malone et al. also cite the benefits of intensive summer institutes.They discuss, of course, the Middlebury summer language institute, and claim that students show clear gains in their language proficiency with 30% of students who enter at the Intermediate level exiting with an Advanced level of proficiency.Similarly to Freed et al., they attest to the significance and salience of the concentrated nature of instruction: "Many students report that they learn more language at Middlebury in one summer than they do in a semester or even a year on a study abroad program" (12).
More recently, as student interest in study abroad has shifted from year-long programs to shorter and shorter programs, researchers have begun focusing on the various academic and cultural effects and benefits of the few short-term domestic immersion programs that exist for college-age students.Two publications in particular corroborate and nuance the findings of the pioneering studies mentioned above on the impact of domestic language study immersion.In the most recent study, Miano et al. (288-89) pose three research questions, two of which echo ours: 1. To what extent can an intensive two-week Spanish immersion experience enhance second language Spanish students' oral and written proficiency?2. To what extent can a domestic immersion experience motivate learners to enroll in upper-level courses and/or study abroad?3. What are students' reactions to a theme-based, short-term immersion experience?
Their findings, based on pre-and post-testing the oral and written proficiency of four groups of program participants from 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015, demonstrate that "most participants improved their oral and writing proficiency by at least one sublevel.A total of 40 out of 51 and 36 of 51 students showed this improvement in oral proficiency and writing proficiency, respectively [...] In all cases of improvement by two sublevels, the progress increased from Intermediate Mid to Advanced Low" (295).However, despite these tangible improvements, students did not use these gains to increase enrollment in upper-level literature and culture classes or to pursue their studies in the language and culture with study abroad.A second, comparative study between nine students in a seven-week home immersion program and nine students on six-week study abroad in Brazil also finds that "home-country program students showed more gains in the ACTFL oral proficiency scale and demonstrated a broader lexical-syntactic repertoire, more cohesion resources, greater awareness/command of sociolinguistic rules and formal discourse, fewer errors, and less fossilization" (Cowles and Wiedemann 13).Although the research objectives of these four publications differed from the questions that we are investigating, they all agree on one of their conclusions: Short-term domestic immersion programs, from two to seven weeks in duration, lead participants to advance measurably in their linguistic progress and their intercultural or global awareness.Moreover, these findings "are remarkable because they contradict the conventional wisdom approach that immersion in the target country is the best way to increase competence in a foreign language in a short period of time" (Cowles and Weidemann 10).

Integrating a Communicative and Pragmatic Competence in an Immersion Course
From its inception, we designed our pedagogical approach to focus on oral communication and pragmatic competence.There are various interpretations of the field of pragmatics, but broadly speaking, Levinson defines it as "the study of language usage" (5).Among the various definitions of pragmatics, Crystal's is especially useful: "[T]he study of language from the view of users, especially in the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects their use of language has on other participants in the act of communication" (301, italics added).Rose and Kasper specify that communicative actions include not only using speech acts-apologizing, complaining, etc.-but also engaging in different types of discourse and participating in speech events of varying length and complexity.Pragmatic competence is thus not only the capacity to participate in communicative situations, but it is also the ability to use speech acts in socially appropriate ways, according to a specific cultural context; it involves knowledge beyond linguistic competence.Grammar is essential but it cannot be separated from social and cultural context.A good level of grammatical competence does not necessarily imply an equally good level of pragmatic competence.Working on pragmatic competence in meaningful interactions not only improves linguistic abilities, it also raises the student's level of enthusiasm and motivation.It not only brings linguistic skills to life, it situates them within a social and cultural context that gives them depth and breadth.It explores the emotional aspect of communicating and often brings laughter and theater into the classroom while stimulating higher cognitive processing.

"Speaking (like the) French: Conversing, Discussing, Arguing, Debating"
In order to provide our students with the linguistic tools that would allow them to achieve and comprehend linguistic action in a contextually appropriate way, we chose materials and designed exercises to expose them to authentic cultural situations, to analyze culture-specific behaviors, to raise awareness of pragmatic norms, to develop interactional skills and intercultural sensitivity.That said, from the outset we were also limited by the practical constraints of fitting the material of a semester-long course within a three-week period.To achieve the equivalence of a full semester course, the program had to maximize contact hours as well as hours spent on task in the target language.The interterm course was designed to meet for a minimum of seven hours per day for the fifteen days of class time (three weeks duration), with an additional two to three hours of work at home per day, and some film viewings and discussions on weekends. 4From this intense rhythm, several consequences about the aims and content of the course followed.First, the course focused mainly on developing oral skills, both oral production and listening comprehension, and though it included substantial reading assignments, it did not concentrate on writing or grammar.Students were expected to know and have mastered grammar basics so that they could concentrate on familiarizing themselves with a wide range of oral expression of native speakers and on practicing the more advanced syntactical structures introduced in the culturally authentic situations, conversations, interviews, formal presentations, debates, discussions and arguments modeled in the basic materials of the course.To encourage our learners to become better communicators and to stimulate their involvement, we concentrated on interactional skills and pragmatic and sociolinguistic competence.Second, we structured the day to include class discussion of readings and film viewings; independent, interactive computer viewing in addition to exercises from French websites; small-group discussions and research projects; role-playing games and global simulations in small groups and with the entire class; independent work on pronunciation; and viewing of films and a variety of television programs.Finally, the pace and intensity of the course called for fully integrating technology and computer-activated learning both to create variety in the tasks and methodologies and to supplement the instructor's active involvement.We therefore designed every unit to include a series of scaffolded, interactive computer materials based on the films, television programs, and interviews that students could use independently or in small groups.The computer exercises allowed them to control the pace of their learning as well as to practice the syntactical structures, the vocabulary, and the gestures of the language acts featured in the materials before implementing these structures more freely in a linguistically and culturally appropriate manner in the more extended global simulations that culminated each of the four units.

Pedagogical Approach and Methodology
Although by 1993 the promise of technology-and computer-assisted language learning had been heralded for some time, and some programs had been developed, nothing was available commercially that fit the aims and needs of the course as we envisioned it. 5We thus set out to design the materials ourselves. 6Just as the exercises for each unit were scaffolded from passive to active, from simple to more complex, from controlled to free role-play, the four units of the three-week course were also designed to progress from what we considered the easiest sociolinguistic situations to understand and practice-conversation with friends and family-to a more controlled discursive production-presenting, reporting, and explaining a set of events or facts, to finally, the most complex social and discursive situationdebate and argument.We were equally attentive to the content of the materials we chose, selecting topics that provided insight into French social and cultural practices, and that would be deemed relevant over time to a cohort of twentyyear-old students-the nuances and complications of sentimental relationships among a group of friends, as portrayed in Éric Rohmer's film, L'ami de mon amie; 7 the French educational system, the cultural values and behaviors it promotes, as shown on television and in a number of contemporary films; the controversy over wearing the veil as seen from the different perspectives of adolescents, teachers, immigrant families, and the French government; and finally the currency that intellectuals and writers maintain in French culture as dramatized by Bernard-Henri Lévy, Gabriel Matzneff, Maurice Bardèche, and Roger Grenier in an intense discussion about Céline, Vichy, and the role of the French in the World War II on an episode of Apostrophes.

From Role-Plays to Global Simulation
Each of the four units follows the same pedagogical progression and pattern, with each unit focusing on mastering increasingly subtle or culturally specific speech acts, practicing role-plays, and culminating in an extensive global simulation.Learners must embody a new persona, assume new cultural, gendered identities, and communicate declarative knowledge on an array of topics such as banking, real estate, travelling, philanthropy, ecology, sustainability, and using not only linguistically appropriate grammar and lexicon, but also demonstrating culturally appropriate pragmatic norms.Learner to learner collaboration helps to build rhetorical effectiveness in a more authentic environment.For example, the final global simulation calls upon students to debate the pros and cons of the extension of the TGV from Paris to Strasbourg, actualizing the array of speech acts and communicative behavior that they have practiced during the three weeks.As scaffolding for this elaborate simulation, students work on two shorter role-plays to introduce and practice appropriate thematic vocabulary, cultural context, and cultural norms.One role-play stages a city council faced with the responsibility to vote on several land-planning scenarios and the other one brings together advocates and critics of a Paris métro strike.For the final TGV simulation, students take on the roles of mayor of Strasbourg, seeking to increase tourism and commerce; members of the French government, arguing for the need to link Strasbourg to Paris and the rest of Europe as rapidly as possible; TGV engineers explaining the train's advanced technology, its safety, and its advantages over plane or automobile transportation; farmers protesting that their land will be split by the track and their farms irreversibly damaged; ecologists fearing environmental disturbances and arguing for safe passageways for animals; and members of the Nancy town council, trying to ensure that the TGV will pass through their city.While the project was underway, the students felt that they really were participating in an actual and pertinent debate.Today, the project is completed, but the complex global simulation still seems valid to our students, as it puts into play many of the same debates over transportation and sustainable resources with which they are familiar and engaged.
When we designed the course in 1993, role-plays and global simulations were still relatively new and not yet as integrated in second language teaching and textbooks as they have become.Since then research has confirmed the positive effect of complex role-plays on language learners, as it encourages them to become agents actively involved in social interactions, to take on different personae, and as such to embody a different language and culture. 8As Dupuy argues: "GS gives students integrated access to authentic input in the target language and cultures, allows them to operate as if they were in the target culture, while being-through dramatic identification-affectively involved, and offers an environment where language and culture learning as a process can be emphasized through the use of formative assessment and students' metacognitive awareness (2).Indeed, the CEFR specifically broadens the parameters of second-language learning by describing "users and learners of a language primarily as 'social agents,' i.e., members of society who have tasks (not exclusively language-related) to accomplish in a given set of circumstances, in a specific environment and within a particular field of action" (18).In an article on interactional analysis based on a corpus of role-plays performed in a FL class of young Chinese adults in Hong Kong, Leblanc affirms the pedagogical value of role-play.According to her research, collective learning strategies such as explicit repetition requests, mutual assistance, corrective reformulations, mutual corrections, making others speak, help effective learning to take place.As learners engage in social interactions the learning process becomes essentially and effectively self-guiding."Students are effectively training for greater autonomy and responsibility in the learning of the foreign language" (33).The instructor is no longer the focal point and the classroom evolves from teacher-centered to learner-learner collaboration.As some studies on collaborative and task-oriented learning have shown, weaker learners are not the only ones to benefit from pair and group work: "Both the stronger and the weaker learner brought their interactional skills to bear on the activity and shifted expert-novice roles during interaction.It was not the case that only the weaker learner profited from the activity at the cost of the stronger partner.[...] there was no evidence of learners picking up each other's errors; rather, they assisted each other in reaching more advanced levels of communicative ability" (Rose and  Kasper 38-39).Learners cooperate and assist each other to reach higher levels of communicative ability.

Analysis of Student Evaluations
We tabulated student evaluations over thirteen years between 1994 and 2011 (the course was not taught every year).We updated the data with three more recent years (2014-16).The student comments corroborate the above research findings and provide specific feedback on what they considered to have contributed the most to their learning, their improvement in understanding native speakers, and their own greater comfort in ability to act, speak and participate in culturally appropriate ways.The evaluation form we developed was originally intended to get specific feedback on the computer-aided exercises, the reading materials, and the overall effect and affect of the intensive pace in order to revise or adjust the course accordingly.It asks specific questions and invites reflective feedback from the students and as such differs from the end-of-semester evaluations administered for every course at our institution.While we expected useful feedback from the student responses, we were surprised by the consensus over the years about some aspects of the course.In particular, they provide information regarding the pedagogical benefit of role-plays and the students' self-perception of the amount of learning achieved in an immersion program compared to a semester-long course.
The most consistent response highlights the importance of the role-plays, including the end-of-unit global simulations, and our students' perception of their progress.Charts 1-3 summarize the findings collected in 2007, 2010, and  2015:  Eleven out of the sixteen years, role-plays and global simulations together lead as the aspect having the most importance in the students' overall learning.It comes as the second and third best in the other five years of the evaluations.In their explanatory comments, students remark that they enjoyed creating a French persona and adjusting to the socio-pragmatics of French encounters to strive to achieve native-like utterances and behaviors.As a sample of their responses suggest, students recognize role-plays as one of the best tools to increase their communicative competence: 1998: "The role playing really helped not only with a growth of vocabulary and expressions but also increased my confidence and willingness to talk out loud in French."2007: "The role playing games and the 4 épreuves [global simulations] helped me most in my assimilation of French, continued use of vocabulary and sentence structures.I got used to speaking French without thinking."2015: The role-plays "were extremely helpful.Though repeating the same phrases was tiring, I definitely was able to retain la plupart."

The Immersion Experience
Chart 4 (1994-2011) traces how students are aware that the immersion model contributed significantly to their achievements.Students consistently responded "yes" to the question: "Did you learn more than in a regular semester?"A sampling of representative student comments from the original analysis of thirteen years of evaluations, and of three more recent years, highlights their enthusiasm and provides a perspective onto their affective engagement and their learning process.
1998: "I have improved my French in 3 weeks in a way I never did in the many years I've been studying French."2002: "I feel that I learned more practical information that I'm not likely to forget as soon as the course ends.It's more a question of quality of learning rather than quantity.I had to apply what I learned every day and it was because of that that it will stay with me." 2005: "This course was more French immersion than going abroad!" 2010: "I believe that the intensive aspect was key to overcoming any insecurities about practicing the language out loud." 2011: "Speaking French all day is probably the most beneficial thing."2014: "I think it would be impossible to have this course taught over the length of a semester, because we would lose the ability to have 7-hour long classes each day.The aspect of immersion is integral and cannot be replaced!Speaking French for hours every day allowed me and the other students to improve immensely just in a span of three weeks!"

Intensive Courses in the French Curriculum Landscape
When suggesting ways to help develop high-level speakers, Malone et al. have emphasized the beneficial outcomes of intensive programs: "Language gained in an immersion setting is an excellent preparation for the study abroad experience, with all its cultural and psychological challenges, because the immersion program provides students language skills needed to make the most of the cultural We can see from the data collected that 45% of the students who took the immersion course became French majors in contrast to only 12% of the students who took the equivalent intermediate-level course.Clearly, the difference of percentage of French majors between the two groups is noteworthy, suggesting that students who took FRN235j were more likely to major in French.We can interpret the numbers two ways: Students who take the immersion course are more serious about studying French (even before registering for the course) or/and the course encourages students to reach another level of ease and competence with the language, which then motivates them to become majors.In either case, the course plays a crucial role in our curriculum, whether to serve our most dedicated students or to convert dilettantes into passionate Francophiles.challenges experienced on study abroad" (12).Another set of data we tabulated for the years 1994 to 2011 compares the group of 1134 students who enrolled in a semester-long intermediate French course (FRN 230), with the 206 students who enrolled in the immersion course (FRN 235j).Both courses serve students at the intermediate/B1 level and are the first courses in the language/culture/literature sequence that do not focus primarily on grammar.They differ in their intensity and pedagogical approach.Students enrolling in the January immersion course often do so after the semester-long FRN 230.The data we collected suggest that a domestic immersion course can hold a crucial place in the curriculum of foreign language learning, more specifically in a subsequent engagement with the language and culture.
Our first question was whether the immersion course played a role in the decision of our students to major in French Studies.Our second inquiry was to compare the percentage of students in the immersion course who enrolled in a study abroad program in a French-speaking locale with the students in the non-immersion group.Unsurprisingly, the findings corroborate the role of the course for students who chose to major in French.As in the first comparison, we cannot discern whether the higher percentage of students enrolling in a study abroad program from those students who had taken the immersion course means that those students took the course because they were already planning to study abroad and thus wanted to better their linguistic competence or whether the course inspired them to continue French by studying in a French-speaking country.We can, however, state that the course provides an important preparation for 55% of those students who pursue studying French abroad.
It is interesting to note that for students who could not study abroad, the course functioned as an alternative immersion experience.As one student remarked in her evaluation: "It's a very good course for people who are not able to go Junior Year Abroad" (1999).Another student's reflections about whether she would renew the experience highlight both how the course gave her the confidence to advance in her language studies and to consider study abroad: 2005: "There were times when I thought, 'what have I gotten myself into?
Where did my vacation go?' But in spite of the intensity and the time commitment, I would absolutely do it again.The overall payoff of the course made all the work worth it.I'm so looking forward to my courses this coming semester because I feel confident about my French now.I've also re-sparked my interest in going abroad, which is great!" Our analysis shows further that students in the immersion group take more 200-level courses than the students in the non-immersion group.Among students in the immersion group, the peak of the distribution is four courses; in contrast, the peak for the non-immersion group is only two courses.Furthermore, the number of courses that students in the non-immersion group take declines rapidly after four courses: While only 4% of those students enroll in five courses, 28% of the students from the immersion group enroll in five.This noteworthy difference implies strongly that students taking the short-term immersion course are much more committed French students.
More than twenty years after first offering the course in January 1994, the materials and design of the course continue to serve our students.Indeed, the student evaluations from the cohort of fourteen students from this past January 2017 interterm course echo the comments and findings from previous cohorts.Once again role-playing games and global simulations were cited as some of the most important aspects in the overall learning.Over the years we have changed and updated the readings, selected recent films, created new role-plays, made Finally, we also analyzed the number and level of French courses students in the immersion and the non-immersion groups enrolled in after their regular semester or short-term immersion experience.Data from Table 3 show that students who took the immersion course did take more courses beyond FRN 235j than students who had not.The difference is especially noteworthy with courses at the 200 upper-intermediate level that follow FRN 235j and those at the 300 advanced level.more use of online material, and included new activities, but always with the same pedagogical goals in mind.Importantly, since 1994, research in the field of pragmatics and studies comparing student learning outcomes in study abroad programs with domestic immersion programs support and confirm the approach based on pragmatics and communicative competence that we took in designing this intensive immersion course.Our own research, presented here, corroborates the findings of others.An at-home immersion experience is definitely beneficial to learners.The immersion model allows for role-plays that lead to extended global simulations in which students learn pragmatic norms, struggle with linguistic skills, confront various discursive strategies, become aware of different sociocultural environments, and eventually juggle multiple literacies.Our data suggests that the condensed time period creates a framework for more intense and continuous engagement, crucial for the acquisition of communicative competence. 9Just as important, such a program is also a great strategy for departments of French studies to retain, motivate, and engage students.The initial goal of this study-to encourage students at the intermediate level to reenergize and pursue their study of a foreign language and understanding in greater depth and nuance of another culture-continues to be as urgent. 10ith College (MA)

Notes
1 Malone et al. argue that the way second language teaching is delivered in the majority of American schools and universities makes it difficult for students to experience the necessary contact hours to reach advanced and superior levels of competence.They offer an array of solutions, such as early immersion programs, study abroad as well as intensive immersion programs at home.

2
The results of spending a summer in an immersion program at Middlebury are well-known, though other than anecdotal testimonies, Freeman's 1975 history of the program, and Spielmann and Radnofsky's 2001 article on learning a language under tension, there is little research on the benefits of Middlebury's programs.

3
The intensive seven-week summer program had an average of 3-4 hours a day of formal classroom study (17.5 hours, weekly average) and numerous learning activities outside of the classroom such as participation on a soccer team and a choir, painting classes, musical performances, films, cabaret as well as trips, parties and cultural events.The twelve students signed a "French only" language pledge.In the semester study abroad program in Paris, eight students were enrolled in a twelve-week course of instruction, spending 2-5 hours per day in classes (16.4 hours, weekly average).Students with stronger skills were able to take classes at French institutes and universities.

4
The total hours students spend thus come to between 141 and 156 hours.This number compares to the 156 hours per semester spent in a regular 13-week course (meeting 3 hours a week, with an expected 3 hours of preparation for each class hour).

5
The interactive computer/video program, À la rencontre de Philippe, developed by Gilberte Furstenberg in 1992 at MIT with funds from the Annenberg Foundation served as inspiration for our own programs.For a detailed description of how the interactive features of the story and program worked, see Gray.

6
A generous grant from the Mellon Foundation funded the development of the materials and the technical support of Joanne Cannon. 7Rohmer's films offer ideal material for second language learning in that the conversations they consist of, though scripted, present enough spontaneity and genuine aspects of live conversation to serve as models for students.8 Debyser has been arguing for the effectiveness of global simulations in teaching language and culture since 1973, but it was in L'immeuble (1996) that this approach began to be more fully integrated.More recently, Michelson and Dupuy have been conducting research on the outcomes of learners' awareness of language and other "social signifying practices" in fourth-semester French curricula.9 Recently students going on study abroad have had to take the Test de la connaissance du français a month after finishing the immersion course.Nine out of fourteen students took the TCF in Spring 2014, and eight of fourteen in Spring 2015.Of the total of seventeen students, four achieved the B2 level, twelve the B1 level, and one the A2 level.We warmly thank Christiane Beasley, our student assistant who compiled the 13 years of evaluations and presented the findings in readable charts; and Chi Gao, Jina Hua Lin, and Ruobin Zhang, who undertook the comparative analysis of 1134 students taking a semester-long, intermediate-level French course with the 206 students enrolled in the immersion course, as part of their special studies in Statistical Consulting.

Works Cited
10

Table 3 Comparison of number and level of courses taken by students after their enrollment in either the immersion [FRN 235j] or the non-immersion [FRN 230] courses
Cowles, Maria Antonia, and Lyris Wiedemann."The Impact of Target-Country Versus Home-Country Immersion Programs on Foreign Language Learners of Portuguese."Connections 2 (2008): 1-15.Crystal, David, ed.Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language.2 nd ed.Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.Debyser, Francis.L'immeuble.Paris: Hachette, 1996.Dupuy, Beatrice."L'immeuble: French Language and Culture Teaching and Learning Through Projects in a Global Simulation."Project-Based Learning in Second Language Education.Vol. 5. Ed.J. Hammadou-Sullivan.Greenwich, CT: Information Age, 2006.