French Immersion: What the Research Shows

French Immersion is a programme offered within Ontario's English-language school boards in which students learn subject content through French. This page summarises what published research reports about outcomes in immersion programmes. It reports findings; it does not recommend for or against enrolment.

English literacy development

The most consistently replicated finding in this literature concerns English literacy. Research reviewed by Fred Genesee at McGill University reports that students in early total immersion initially score below English-programme peers on English literacy measures, then catch up — with the reviewed evidence indicating this occurs within roughly one to two years of English language arts being introduced.[2][4]

The explanation offered in that literature is cross-linguistic transfer: literacy skills acquired in French transfer to English rather than competing with it.[2] Reviews of research from the 1970s and 1980s report that immersion students reached levels of English competence in reading, writing, speaking and listening comparable to — and in some studies exceeding — those of students in all-English programmes.[2]

Mathematics and other subject achievement

Province-wide Ontario data has been used to examine this question directly. A study published in The Canadian Modern Language Reviewanalysed Grade 3 immersion students' performance in literacy and mathematics using Ontario province-wide results.[7]Genesee and Erdos's research summary for practitioners similarly addresses mathematics achievement among immersion students.[4]

Students with learning or reading difficulties

This is the question most frequently raised by families, and it has been studied specifically. Genesee's 2007 review in The Canadian Modern Language Review examined research on at-risk students — those with low academic ability or limited first-language skills — in immersion programmes.[1]

The reviewed research reports that at-risk students in immersion experienced no greater disadvantage in English language development or overall academic achievement than comparable students in English programmes — that is, these students faced similar academic difficulties in either setting.[1][3]

On intervention, Genesee has noted that the research base is limited, but suggested that effective interventions for second-language learners with reading difficulties incorporate many of the practices used with first-language readers who struggle, and that early identification and intervention have positive outcomes.[1]

More recent work has examined the stability and overlap of English and French word reading difficulties in immersion children over three years,[5] and academic achievement in English among students who speak a minority language at home and are enrolled in early immersion.[6]

An important caution when comparing schools

Immersion is an opt-in programme. Because families apply, and because students may transfer to the English programme at any point, the composition of an immersion cohort is not a random sample of students. Comparisons between immersion cohorts and English-programme cohorts, or between schools with and without large immersion programmes, are therefore affected by selection.

This is the same class of problem discussed in the research on income and test scores: differences in measured results may reflect who is in the group being measured rather than the effect of the programme itself.

Finding immersion schools on this site

You can filter for French Immersion on our rankings page, and each school profile indicates whether the programme was detected.

A limitation we state plainly: our programme flags are compiled automatically by scanning school websites. They are incomplete — roughly a third of school websites could not be scanned — and may be out of date. Schools where no scan succeeded are marked as unverified. Always confirm programme availability with the school board directly.