Unfair comparison to native speakers
Cummins (1998, 2014) identifies that the quality of written and oral production skills in the L2 is an issue among French immersion students, suggesting that students’ receptive skills are often stronger than their production skills. Baker (2011) claims that immersion students “may not attain native speaker language competence in all dimensions” and “do not always become grammatically accurate in their French” (p.268). The Alberta Education website (2014) describes the objectives of the French immersion program as follows: full mastery of the English language, functional fluency in French, as well as an understanding and appreciation of the French culture. Unfortunately the comparison to native speakers of the French language continues to promote the monolingual (or fractional) view of bilingualism which is described by Grosjean (2008, p.10) as having competencies that are similar to those of the two corresponding monolinguals (English and French). Roy (2008) asks researchers to “rethink bilingualism and multilingualism in Canada” stating that much of the research has focused on “evaluating the competencies of French immersion students against those of francophones” (p.404). She asks that French immersion students be evaluated in their own right.