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The interactions of a linguistically mixed teaching staff of an immersion school in Montreal were explored to determine their influence on the integrative objectives of immersion programs. Teachers' formal and informal interactions were observed to feature the predominant use of English and the use of silence to avoid code switching and functioned to manage conflict to the detriment of integrative immersion goals. Conflict among the staff arose from disagreements about immersion programs, conflicting societal and professional norms and the school's organizational divisions. A projective technique was used to determine if perceptions of linguistic norms of 176 grades 1 to 6 pupils reflected the interactions of eight immersion and four English stream teachers. The study underlines the importance of the interactional context and organization of schools with mixed staff groups of achieving bilingual education goals. Attainment of integrative objectives may hinge on the degree of correspondence between stated aims and actual practice.

Linguists and psychologists alike have long overlooked the study of creole languages. We know very little about language and reading acquisition in young creole speakers. The aim of the present study was to examine the development of reading-related skills in native speakers of Haitian Creole (HC), a French-based creole, educated in French. In order to isolate the effects of speaking two highly similar languages, we compared Haitian children in 1st and 2nd grade to Spanish-French bilingual children and French monolingual children from European descent. Children from our sample were from five different schools in Montreal and had similar socioeconomic status. Participants were tested individually over three sessions on French standardized and experimental tasks assessing metalinguistic awareness, reading, comprehension, vocabulary and mathematical skills. Bilingual children were also tested on reading and spelling tasks in HC and Spanish. Results showed that HC and Spanish bilinguals performed as well as French native speakers on metalinguistic and reading tasks. However, Spanish-speaking children received lower scores than children in the two other groups on a receptive vocabulary measure. In an experimental task comparing the spelling of words of varying phonological similarity in HC and French, Haitian children had more difficulty spelling words that are cognates in HC and French than homophones or noncognate translations. Findings from this study were interpreted in light of the Bilingual Interactive Activation model (Dijsktra & Van Heuven, 1998).

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