Although generally acknowledged as complex and multidimensional, bilingual education, when successful, plays an important role in maintaining and developing bilingualism, resulting in numerous benefits to those who undertake it. This essay will discuss the necessary components and principles of what is required to make a successful bilingual…

Through a sociolinguistic analysis of interactional spaces created by the teachers and students at one 50/50 dual immersion school, this study examines how teachers present and implement this school's language policy and how these practices are reproduced and transformed through the language choices of the students in their daily interactions. The…

In this paper, we undertake a cross-national comparison of early partial immersion programmes, known as dual language or Modelo B programmes, in the USA and the Basque Country in Spain, respectively. We attempt to make sense of their growth, the expanded social uses of the minority languages, and address seemingly contradictory pedagogical…

The Threshold Project examined the nature of the language and learning difficulties that black Standard Three (Std 3, or grade 5) children in South Africa experience when they change from their mother tongue to English as a medium of instruction and learning, a policy known as "delayed immersion." This report focuses on the first major…

The Threshold Project, a 3-year project that followed a 1985 pilot study, examined the nature of the language and learning difficulties that black Standard Three (Std 3, or grade 5) children in South Africa experience when they change from their mother tongue of Sepedi to English as a medium of instruction and learning, a policy known as…