Lapkin, S. (1984). How well do immersion students speak and write French? The Canadian Modern Language Review 40 (5), 575-585.

This study used Swain's (1982) four underlying principles: start from somewhere, concentrate on content, bias for best, and work for washback, to conduct an analysis of oral and written competencies of early immersion, later immersion, and francophone students. Through analyzing a series of group discussions and letter writing assignments the study sought to compare competencies of second language learners in immersion settings with those of francophones. The analysis of the written material included subjective judgments of quality by blind raters (teachers) and objective counts of errors and good uses in a variety of categories. Other discourse elements such as conjunction or adverb usage were also scored as was grammatical competence. The differences between francophone and second language learners were shown to be significantly different. Francophones make almost no errors in gender or prepositions while immersion students are prone to them. There are few anglicisms in francophone letters while immersion students readily transfer from English. Fixed and idiomatic expressions characterize fancophone writing, as do correct pronominal choice, word choice, and consistent tense use. The study argues that contexts must be varied for communication in the classroom and that increased exposure to the language correlates with improved receptive skills. They conclude the immersion students speak and write French well enough for effective communication but not well enough to be indistinguishable from their native French speaking counterparts.