ABSTRACT
Bilingual education, also known as dual-language curriculum, is an instructional approach that offers academic content in two languages and instruction in a second language. The bilingual instructional approach is used to some extent in almost every country in the world. This chapter will refer to the research on bilingual education programs in public schools within the United States, serving a student population that is preponderantly the children of non-English-speaking immigrants and other marginalized groups. In 1991, there were approximately 40 million public and private school srudents enrolled in K-12 in the United States; of these, 2.2 million were limited English speakers (LEPs), and 250,000 of this subset were enrolled in bilingual education programs funded by the federal government (Cisneros and Leone, 1995). No statistics are available to tell us how many additional students, limited English-speaking or otherwise, participate in bilingual education programs funded by other sources: local, state, or private.
