Reports on a survey of mother tongue teaching and support for primary age pupils in England and Wales, undertaken as part of the Schools Council Mother Tongue Project. The analysis indicates that the majority of local education authorities now have a multilingual school population, and that bilingual pupils can communicate in a wide range of…

The use of the Language Background Questionnaire is analyzed, and the following criticisms are offered: (1) the varying nature and range of questions used, (2) the inclusion of indirect language background questions, and (3) previous methods of categorization of individuals into groups using language background scores. (SL)