Making sense of the Australian French immersion classroom

The study reported in this paper investigated the processes involved in the acquisition of French by students in late immersion programmes in Australia. An ethnographic style of data collection was used, covering a full school year. The roles of three main themes which emerged from the data are dealt with in this paper: comprehensible input, internalised speech and comprehensible output. It is concluded that comprehensible input alone is not sufficient for language learning to occur. Acquisition occurs because of a balance between input and output, mediated by the use of private speech.