Following recommendations by the European Commission, bilingualism has been promoted in various ways in the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg. Language classes and the concept of immersion were gradually introduced in primary schools, while, at the secondary level, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programmes were established. The present study analyses how these programmes interact with intelligence, motivation and anxiety. Data were collected from 419 learners in Grade 11 by means of two psychometric tests. Interaction between primary-level language lessons and intelligence proved to be minor, while motivation was found to be higher and inhibiting exam anxiety lower the earlier pupils had started learning English. Regarding programmes at the secondary level, highly significant differences were observed with respect to, in particular, verbal aspects of intelligence, with CLIL participants outperforming their non-CLIL peers. Likewise, motivation proved to be greater among CLIL learners, who were also found to suffer from a higher level of fear of success. Our results show that programmes promoting bilingualism not only influence L2 proficiency, but are related to cognitive and affective variables in ways that should be made explicit by curricula and taken into account by research on the linguistic outcomes of selective programmes such as CLIL.