English immersion in content based elementary...

النوع : Mémoire

This thesis entitled “English Immersion Models in Content-Based Elementary Science Classes in North Lebanon” is built on five major cornerstones. The demonstration of the current Lebanese academic curriculum as a partial immersion model on the basis of a decree issued by the Lebanese Ministry of Education and its goals concerning the academic curricula is the first cornerstone. This is done by using The General Educational Curricula and Their Goals issued by the Lebanese Ministry of Education in 1997. The surveying of the extent of application of this partial immersion curricular model as specified by the Lebanese government in the different schools teaching English as a first foreign language in North Lebanon is the second cornerstone. Such a survey allows the researcher to choose five schools from those that follow a partial immersion model in Lebanon. A list of six vital teaching characteristics and techniques that improve students’ reading comprehension skills in an immersion setting is derived from the literature about instructional strategies in an immersion setting, the act that comprises a third major cornerstone. The list is utilized in the observation research portion. The naturalistic observation research part is the fourth cornerstone of the present thesis. The subjects of this descriptive observation research are science classes in grades 4, 5 and 6 in five schools: Tripoli Evangelical School, Bishmizzine High School, Modern School in Kferhazir, and Al- Minieh Public School. The results of this naturalistic observation and interview are used in the causal-comparative research part, which is the fifth essential cornerstone. The subjects are half the number of students in grades 4, 5 and 6 of each of the five subject schools. The material used is the assessment tests designed for each of the three grades to evaluate their reading comprehension skills. The classes taught by science teachers who score the same on the scale of the five teaching characteristics and strategies in the previous observation part are compared. These five teaching characteristics and strategies become the controlled variables. The sixth teaching technique that is left and that these teachers’ scores differ in is the independent variable. The dependent variable is the means of student scores on the assessment tests. Results reveal the effectiveness of specific reading techniques in science classes.