Multilingual learners (MLs) are the country's fastest-growing student population: One in five students speak a language other than English at home, and 10 percent of the student population across the country is identified for language development services in school. Despite these students' growing presence nationwide, relatively few best practices…

In the era of globalisation, language-in-education policies continue to present challenges as policy-makers across the globe aim to balance the emphasis given to students' first language and the pressing need for students to be proficient in English as the global "lingua franca" [Hanna, P. (2011). Gaining global perspective: Educational…

This article examines how bilingual programs are often guided by larger social constructs of race and language ideologies that give rise to the often inconsistent, and even contradicting, perceptions of Latina/o, Spanish-speaking students' academic preparedness and abilities. I examine a number of language ideologies as they manifested in a case…

Catholic elementary schools underserve Latino students, especially those who are bilingual. This paper presents a conceptual argument for Catholic elementary schools to improve this by pursuing the two-way immersion model of bilingual service delivery in Spanish and English. The argument is presented in three stages. First, we show that Catholic…

This ethnographic case study explores school culture through the lens of Dewey's (1915/2001) belief in the importance of creating schools with a sense of community in which all members are indispensable to the whole. Three aspects of the foreign language immersion curriculum at South Boulevard Elementary lead to a culture of community: commitment…

This article contributes to our knowledge of endangered language revitalization by offering a case study of a Cherokee Nation (CN) preschool immersion program named Tsalagi Ageyui, "Our Beloved Cherokee." A naturalistic inquiry into the micro- and macrosociocultural dimensions of reversing Cherokee language shift reveals that, of all CN language…

In this paper, I first review previous research on the topic of safetalk. I then apply some of the insights derived from this discussion to a case study of the Luxembourgish primary school system. The study uses both ethnographic and discourse analysis, and focuses in particular on the role of French language varieties in a system that forces…

Whereas most research on child second language acquisition has focused on the oral production of children, studies are needed to illuminate patterns of literacy development in a second language. This paper aims to shed some light on this process, focusing on the English writing development of a native Spanish speaker, and on the Spanish writing…

This paper takes a specific university Department of Romance Languages as a case study to examine how the measures it adopted in view of increasing enrollment in Spanish in the nineties coincide with the recommendations in the MLA's 2007 report; it also examines how they have fared after some 12 years of implementation, advances explanations for…

Reports on a case study of face-to-face interaction around and about texts between a second grade dyad in a dual-immersion (English/Portuguese) programme. Reveals multiple pedagogical scaffolds, few of which were unexpected. Concludes that Buddy Reading encouraged the peer readers to acknowledge and draw upon each other's expertise, as they…

Difficulties faced in evaluations that include data in a language not native to the evaluators or that lie outside the evaluators' cultural experience are discussed. Improvements to credibility and fairness from using a cross-cultural, bilingual evaluation are described and illustrated through evaluation of a language immersion program in Hawaii.…

The design and effectiveness of the Amigos program, a two-way Spanish-English bilingual immersion program in Cambridge (Massachusetts) are described. In the program, half the instruction is in English, half in Spanish from kindergarten through eighth grade. Half the students are native Spanish-speakers and half are native English-speakers. The…

Two-way, or bilingual, immersion education, a major innovation in the integration of language and content instruction, is intended to improve the quality of language education for language minority and language majority students in the United States. The emerging educational practice responds to the increasing proportions of language minority…

A study of French immersion teacher education programs at Simon Fraser University and Faculte Saint-Jean (University of Alberta) in Canada is reported. The in-depth case studies examined program clientele, models, participant experiences and needs, and planning, especially in relation to current research on teacher education. (Author/MSE)

Two models of content-based second language instruction are compared. The two models, French language immersion and mainstreaming, are illustrated in two case studies that focus on how minority language children fare in kindergarten programs. The first case study is of a native Cantonese-speaking child enrolled in an early French immersion program…