Article In:
Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education: Online-First Articles

Basque-French “Grand Oral” assessment in Basque immersion education

Analysis of high school students’ bilingual strategies

ORCID logo | University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU
| Université Bordeaux Montaigne | University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU
This contribution aims to explore the bilingual strategies of students producing the bilingual Basque-French “Grand Oral” (GO) text genre in the only Basque immersion high school in Northern Basque Country (NBC henceforth) (France). 20 immersion students’ Basque-French GO productions are analysed. Previous research with similar text genres in the Basque Autonomous Community (Spain) shows that even if immersion students successfully manage linguistic alternation, they scarcely adapt Basque terminology when using English. The GO is an explanatory-argumentative text genre, addressed to a jury involving a monolingual French speaker. The analysis shows that students alternate languages with no lexico-grammatical difficulties. However, when they refer to Basque terms in French, they hardly include any clarification for the non-Basque-speaking member of the jury. These findings could shed light on a better understanding of Basque immersion students’ oral bilingual strategies and could contribute to the development of plurilingual teaching approaches in NBC multilingual education, which remain unexplored.
Keywords: immersion education, Northern Basque Country, bilingual Grand Oral, bilingual strategies, language alternation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Basque-medium education and immersion schools in Northern Basque Country
  • 3.The “Grand Oral” assessment
    • 3.1Description of the assessment
    • 3.2The bilingual modality of the “Grand Oral”
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1The context: Etxepare High School, a unique immersion education establishment
    • 4.2Participants
    • 4.3The GO activity analysed in the study
    • 4.4Analysis criteria
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1The opening and closing sections
    • 5.2Explanation of the language alternation
    • 5.3Quoting literary references
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Note
  • Author queries
  • References
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