St. Lambert Immersion Study

The story of the St. Lambert “experiment” in Canada began in the early 1960s during a time of rising tensions between the Anglophone (English-speaking) and Francophone (French-speaking) communities in [Page 804]the province of Quebec. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Canada in general, and Quebec in particular, constituted what the novelist Hugh MacLennan called “two solitudes.” One could effectively live one's life in Montreal, for example, almost entirely in English with hardly an occasion in which one absolutely needed to communicate with someone in French about social, occupational, recreational, or other matters. But change was in the air. A variety of political initiatives were under way during the 1960s to legislate French as the official “working language” of the province, and many parents—particularly those whose children attended English-medium schools—were concerned that the second- or foreign-language programs in the public schools did not adequately prepare their children to acquire the communicative skills they would need to participate effectively in Quebec society in the future. This entry describes the implementation of this program, and its contributions to bilingual education research.