Immersion programs face a variety of challenges that are common to the field, such as lack of materials appropriate for students' language abilities, assessment, teacher recruitment and retention, balancing content and language, and relevant, high quality professional development for teachers. However, within specific micro-contexts, other issues…

This study examined seven Louisiana kindergarten immersion teachers' practices to evaluate students' oral target language production and compare the oral production elicited when different instructional practices were used over a single semester. Three rounds of three 20-minute observations in three different contexts--circle time, direct…

Although immersion programs are very popular in Canada, they are complex to implement and not as successful as we would hope them to be when it comes to the development of students' language skills. This article reports on the findings of a case study conducted within the context of an ongoing five-year grant funded project in Western Canada whose…

This paper discusses how teachers in a bilingual education programme see their pedagogies and interactions influencing student connection to the languages of the bilingual programme. The teacher perception of the classroom is explored because the classroom is one of the principal settings in which the students negotiate their bilingual identities.…

Using an ecology of language framework, the purpose of this study was to examine the degree to which English as a medium of instruction (EMI) at a private university in eastern Ukraine allows for the use of Ukrainian, the state language, or Russian, the predominantly spoken language, in large cities in eastern Ukraine. Uses of English and Russian…

In this article, the author explores the phenomenon of children's language choice and language use in a Korean-English two-way immersion (TWI) program. She does so by drawing on situations in which the children spoke of the principles guiding their choice of languages, and instances in which they voluntarily adopted Korean as the means of…

Trauma pedagogy occupies an intriguing space within the discourse about effective teaching of culturally and linguistically diverse students, particularly in relation to preservice teacher notions of power. One set of messages received by future teachers strongly advocates for asserting authority within the classroom by taking control via strict…

A challenge noted in a number of endangered language contexts is the need to mix second-language (L2) learners of the target language with first-language (L1) speakers of that language in a less planned way than is found in the two-way immersion approach. Such mixing of L1 speakers of the target language with L2 learners arises from the difficulty…

There are many types of programs for Spanish speaking students in the US, with varying methods and goals. Some preliminary work suggests that bilingual classrooms may differ widely in instruction, even under the same program labels. However, there are few studies which have compared the extent to which various bilingual program models differ in…

In the era of globalisation, language-in-education policies continue to present challenges as policy-makers across the globe aim to balance the emphasis given to students' first language and the pressing need for students to be proficient in English as the global "lingua franca" [Hanna, P. (2011). Gaining global perspective: Educational…

Two-way immersion (TWI) programs teach English Learners (ELs) and native English speakers in the same classroom using both languages in an immersion approach. Studies suggest that TWI programs result in greater student integration, thus providing a promising alternative for Spanish speaking ELs, who are frequently concentrated in high poverty,…