Bilingual education involves teaching academic content in two languages, in a native and secondary language with varying amounts of each language used in accordance with the program model. Bilingual education refers to the utilization of two languages as means of instruction for students and considered part of or the entire school curriculum, as distinct from simply teaching a second language as a subject.
Language education – the process and practice of teaching a second or foreign language – is primarily a branch of applied linguistics, but can be an interdisciplinary field. There are four main learning categories for language education: communicative competencies, proficiencies, cross-cultural experiences, and multiple literacies.
Dekasegi is a term that is used in Brazil to refer to people, primarily Japanese Brazilians, who have migrated to Japan, having taken advantage of Japanese citizenship or nisei visa and immigration laws to work short-term in Japan.
Language immersion, or simply immersion, is a technique used in bilingual language education in which two languages are used for instruction in a variety of topics, including math, science, or social studies. The languages used for instruction are referred to as the L1 and the L2 for each student, with L1 being the student's native language and L2 being the second language to be acquired through immersion programs and techniques. There are different types of language immersion that depend on the age of the students, the classtime spent in L2, the subjects that are taught, and the level of participation by the speakers of L1.
Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process. The field of second-language acquisition is a sub-discipline of applied linguistics but also receives research attention from a variety of other disciplines, such as psychology and education.
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all Europeans claim to speak at least one language other than their mother tongue; but many read and write in one language. Always useful to traders, multilingualism is advantageous for people wanting to participate in globalization and cultural openness. Owing to the ease of access to information facilitated by the Internet, individuals' exposure to multiple languages is becoming increasingly possible. People who speak several languages are also called polyglots.
French immersion is a form of bilingual education in which students who do not speak French as a first language will receive instruction in French. In most French-immersion schools, students will learn to speak French and learn most subjects such as history, music, geography, math, art, physical education and science in French. Most school boards in Ontario offer French Immersion starting in grade one and others start as early as senior kindergarten. With the Toronto District School Board, French immersion is offered starting in senior kindergarten. At the primary level, students will receive instructions in French at a hundred percent of their instructional day. English instruction is introduced in grade 4, and the minutes of English instruction will increase throughout their educational career with up to fifty percent of English/French instruction daily.
Basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) are language skills needed to interact in social situations, for example, when chatting to a friend.
Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is the section of the Constitution of Canada that guarantees minority language educational rights to French-speaking communities outside Quebec, and, to a lesser extent, English-speaking minorities in Quebec. The section may be particularly notable, in that some scholars believe that section 23 "was the only part of the Charter with which Pierre Trudeau was truly concerned." Trudeau was the prime minister who fought for the inclusion of the Charter of Rights in the Constitution of Canada in 1982.
Sequential bilingualism, also referred to as successive bilingualism, occurs when one becomes bilingual by first learning one language and then another. Sequential bilingualism is contrasted with simultaneous bilingualism, in which both languages are learned at the same time.
In second-language acquisition, willingness to communicate (WTC) is the idea that language students who are willing to communicate in the second language actively look for chances to communicate; and furthermore, these learners actually do communicate in the second language. Therefore, "the ultimate goal of the learning process should be to engender in language education students" the willingness to communicate.
Catherine Elizabeth Snow is an educational psychologist and applied linguist. In 2009 Snow was appointed to the Patricia Albjerg Graham Professorship in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, having previously held the Henry Lee Shattuck Professorship also in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Snow is past president of the American Educational Research Association (2000-2001). She chaired the RAND Corporation 'reading study group' from 1999.
Bilingual–Bicultural or BiBi deaf education programs use sign language as the native, or first, language of Deaf children. In the United States, for example, BiBi proponents claim that American Sign Language (ASL) is the natural first language for deaf children, despite the majority of deaf and hard of hearing being born to hearing parents. In this same vein, the spoken or written language used by the majority of the population is viewed as a secondary language to be acquired either after or at the same time as the native language.
Dual language is a form of education in which students are taught literacy and content in two languages. Most dual language programs in the United States teach in English and Spanish, but programs increasingly use a partner language other than Spanish, such as Arabic, Chinese, French, Hawaiian, Japanese, or Korean. Dual language programs use the partner language for at least half of the instructional day in the elementary years.
Language education in the United States has historically involved teaching American English to immigrants and Spanish, French, Latin, Italian or German to native English speakers. Bilingual education was sponsored in some districts, often contentiously. Japanese language education in the United States increased following the Japanese post-war economic miracle. This was a period between the Cold War and World War II where Japan had the second largest economy in the world. To participate, the government increased funding to teaching Japanese in schools. Chinese as a second language began to be taught more frequently in response to the Reform and opening of the People's Republic of China; this has included funding from the PRC Government. In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, US Senator Norm Coleman called Arabic "the next strategic language".
Heritage language learning or heritage language acquisition is the act of learning a heritage language from an ethnolinguistic group that traditionally speaks the language, or from those whose family historically spoke the language. According to a commonly accepted definition by Valdés, heritage languages are generally minority languages in society and are typically learned at home during childhood. When a heritage language learner grows up in an environment with a dominant language that is different from their heritage language, the learner appears to be more competent in the dominant language and often feels more comfortable speaking in that language. "Heritage language" may also be referred to as "community language," "home language," and "ancestral language".
Translanguaging is the process whereby multilingual speakers use their languages as an integrated communication system. The term "translanguaging" was coined in the 1980s by Cen Williams in his unpublished thesis titled “An Evaluation of Teaching and Learning Methods in the Context of Bilingual Secondary Education.” However, the dissemination of the term, and of the related concept, gained traction decades later due in part to published research by Ofelia García, among others.
The Princeton Community Japanese Language School is a Japanese weekend school in the Princeton, New Jersey area. It holds weekend Japanese classes for Japanese citizen children abroad to the standard of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), and it also has classes for people with Japanese as a second language.
Lilly Wong Fillmore is an American linguist. She is Professor Emerita in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has focused on second language learning and teaching and on education in language minority communities.
The following is a list of bilingual education by country or region.
