The "Filière Bilingue" (FiBi) is a Swiss public two-way immersion program integrating French-speaking, German-speaking and allophone learners (having neither French nor German as an L1) in each class. Located in the bilingual city of Biel/ Bienne, the "diglossic" situation represented by the use of Swiss German and standard…

Students learning to read in more than one language, or emerging biliterates, are becoming increasingly common in schools. Early screening and identification of reading difficulties may lead to better outcomes for emerging biliterates as well as monolingual English students. Oral reading fluency (ORF) is one tool shown to be both a reliable…

This study investigated first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition in two age-matched groups of 2- to 6-year-old kindergarten children over the course of 2.5 years. The immersion group participated in a partial English immersion program whereas the conventional instruction group received a conventional L2 course (30 minutes per week); the…

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…

This paper presents aspects of a longitudinal study assessing integrative bilingual learning based on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), implemented in three Swiss primary schools. From Grades 1 to 6, three classes of German-speaking pupils were taught 50% of the curriculum, notably mathematics, in Italian or in Romansh as a second…