English immersion in Sweden : a case study of Röllingby High School, 1987-1989

Sammanfattning: This study reports on a two-year late immersion program with English as the target language which took place from 1987-1989 at Röllinge high school. The project was modelled on similiar late immersion programs in Canada with French as the language of instruction. A class of 25 Swedish students in the pre-engineering course program studied 70% of their subjects in English in 10th grade and 60% of their subjects in English in 11 th grade. It was hypothesized that the immersion class would improve their English language proficiency more than a non-immersion comparison group and that they would not suffer any detrimental effects to either their Swedish or the academic subjects which they studied in English. On several of the proficiency tests the immersion group outperformed the control group. They tended to be more fluent in English, as demonstrated in their writing and in speaking. In their academic subjects, however, by the end of grade 11 their grades and test scores were significantl