It is an underlying principle of Australian Education Review (AER) 54 that active efforts should be made to cultivate the latent bilingual potential within Australia's wider population and that this should be linked to major improvements in the quality of language teaching in schools. A combined approach of this kind will require investment in…

International Grammar School was founded twenty years ago on the belief in the benefits of immersion language learning for children. It offers immersion second language learning in German, Italian, French, and Japanese which continues through kindergarten into the high school years. With language as the medium and not the object of learning,…

This study evaluated a partial-immersion program in French in Victoria, Australia, an area in which little research has been conducted to date. The program has operated at an elementary school since 1991 and is the first English/French program of its kind in Victoria. French is the language of instruction for at least 40 percent of classes, with…

A study investigated the processes underlying acquisition of French by students in two late immersion programs (grades 8-10) in Queensland (Australia). Focus is on three features: the cooperative learning situation that developed, idiosyncratic language that emerged, and students' patterns of socialization. (31 references) (Author/MSE)

The Language and Culture Initial Teacher Education: Primary (LACITEP) program in Australia, a preservice teacher education program designed to train elementary school teachers as specialists in Japanese language teaching, is described. In the partial immersion format, at least half the courses are taught in Japanese. Courses in the first year…

Drawing on a 1993 study of four students in a late French immersion program in Australia and findings from a 1991 study, the report looks at three areas: students' response to the learning context, including its more and less helpful characteristics; the experiences students consider most important for learning the language, including those…

This work is one in a series that focuses on nine languages representing the bulk of the second language learning effort in Australian education (Arabic, Modern Standard Chinese, French, German, Modern Greek, Indonesian/Malay, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish). These languages were categorized as the Languages of Wider Teaching. This particular work…

This document consists of the three issues of the serial "VOX" published in 1989-1991. Major articles in these issues include: "The Original Languages of Australia"; "UNESCO and Universal Literacy"; "Language Shift and Maintenance in Torres Strait"; "Maintaining and Developing Italian in…