While the benefits of early bilingual education programs are widely praised and acknowledged, relatively little is known about the processes involved in child second language acquisition. The aim of this research is to investigate L2 development in young children while school is their only source of exposure to the L2. Relying on corpora collected in two French-American kindergarten and primary schools in California, this work focuses on how French is acquired by English-speaking children from 5 to 7 through immersion education. Following interactionist theories of L2 acquisition, it is shown how this specific context bears on the course of acquisition in terms of interaction opportunities and input addressed to the children, and also how it provides them with scaffolding patterns that are instrumental in the first stages of L2 acquisition. This study also attempts to assess the role of age in L2 acquisition and suggests that "the younger the better" position, as advocated by some researchers, does not necessarily hold in this setting. Instead, it seems that child second language acquisition in this context is a rather complex phenomenon involving many factors such as linguistic and metalinguistic awareness, interaction strategies, or influence from L1. Based on these findings, pedagogical guidelines for bilingual teaching in kindergarten are provided.
