ABSTRACT

At a very general level, the term bilingual education refers to the use of two (or more) languages of instruction at some point in a student’s school career. Each language is used as a medium of instruction to teach subject matter content rather than just the language itself. Despite the apparent simplicity of this description, the phenomenon of bilingual education entails considerable complexity. Variation in the goals and implementation of bilingual education can derive from a multitude of sociopolitical, sociolinguistic, administrative and instructional factors. In addition, the use of a language as a medium of instruction in state-funded school systems confers recognition and status on that language and its speakers. Consequently, bilingual education is not simply a politically neutral instructional phenomenon but rather is implicated in national and international competition between groups for material and symbolic resources. In some contexts (eg the United States), this has resulted in major political controversy surrounding bilingual programmes. Questions related to the educational eff fectiveness of bilingual programmes have become hopelessly confounded with ideological issues related to national identity and unity (Crawford, 2000).