Indigenous methodologies for guiding, advising, and educating children have been in place since time immemorial. Those well-honed approaches to education were built to support whole and healthy individual development while also establishing a lifelong awareness and reverence for community, connection, kinship, and reciprocity. In Western cultures,…

It's one of the ironies of United States culture: We love our history as "a nation of immigrants," but at the same time, we're conflicted about immigration and the changes it brings. In this article, Patricia Gándara examines the research on one area of debate: whether multilingualism should be considered a problem to be fixed, or a…

Educational policies for English language learners (ELLs) tend to focus on English language acquisition. In this chapter, the authors argue that educators need to give more attention to the development of bilingualism and biliteracy to draw upon the tremendous intellectual, linguistic, and cultural resources that bilingual children bring to the…

Applies constructs of language as economic and symbolic capital, transnationalism, investment, and imagined community to analysis of interviews with immigrant parents living in Vancouver, Canada. These parents promote multilingualism by maintaining their family language and enrolling their children in French immersion programs. Argues they view…

Draws on sociocultural theories of language and learning and research on bilingual families to examine home language practices of trilingual-immersion students. Ethnography was used to explore daily language use at home, children's views of their identity as trilingual, families' values of maintenance and additional language learning, and reasons…

Considers the pedagogical validity of English immersion education in Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, Melanesian countries of the South Pacific. Questions the appropriateness of implementing a policy of English language immersion education in a postcolonial, multilingual Third World context where support for first language maintenance and second…

Presented in Inuttitut, French, and English, this report summarizes research initiated by the Kativik School Board, which oversees education in Nunavik (northern Quebec). Four studies examined the current status of Inuttitut in Nunavik, the intellectual ability of Inuit students, and the effects of bilingual education on Inuit students'…

Reports on a 3-year study of approximately 100 students through grades 4, 5, and 6 on the impact of a variety of second-language learning options among English-speaking children in francophone Canada. Finds that those options that use early, French-only environments were most effective. (CFR)

A discussion of multilingualism in Switzerland begins with a description of the country's linguistic characteristics. Historical Swiss policy recognizing four official languages, one of which (Romansch) is spoken by very few people, is compared with the current situation in which internal and external migration and multilingualism are common. The…

This collection of 10 papers focuses on multilingual education programs and policies in Europe, concentrating on publicly-funded, non-elitist programs. The papers include: (1) "Bilingual Education in Wales" (Colin Baker); (2) "Catalan and Basque Immersion Programmes" (Josep Maria Artigal); (3) "Bilingual or Bicultural…

This book is a comprehensive treatment of the literature on second language acquisition in childhood, viewed in terms of contemporary process models. After a general introduction on bilingualism in society, six major topics are considered: first-language acquistion, language acquisition and learning in childhood and adulthood, simultaneous…