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2004 Immersion Conference: Pathways to Bilingualism

Featured Speaker

Fred Genesse Professor, Department of Psychology McGill University

Presentation: Bilingualism in the Global Village

Dr. Genesee is a Professor in the Psychology Department at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He is interested in basic issues related to language learning, representation, and use in bilinguals and in applied issues related to second-language teaching, learning, and testing. He has carried out extensive research on alternative approaches to bilingual education, including second/foreign language immersion programs for language majority students and alternative forms of bilingual education for language minority students. This work has systematically documented the longitudinal language development (oral and written) and academic achievement of students educated through the media of two languages -- their home language and another language. Along with Donna Christian and Liz Howard, he is currently involved in a longitudinal national study of a number of two-way immersion programs in the U.S. His current work also focuses on simultaneous acquisition of two languages during early infancy and childhood -- his specific interests include language representation (lexical and syntactic) in early stages of bilingual acquisition, transfer in bilingual development, structural and functional characteristics of child bilingual code-mixing, and communication skills in young bilingual children.

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