Internationally, there has been growing commitment to bilingual education among policymakers, educators, and researchers. Bilingualism and biliteracy are not uncommon, as more than half the world’s population speaks and learns to read more than one language. Growing globalization in commerce and immigration have motivated countries across the globe to adopt policies promoting bilingual education.
Bilingual education reflects any curriculum that strategically uses two or more languages in instruction. These programs reflect one of two primary goals: supporting language-minority students in the acquisition of language, literacy skills, and academic content in the dominant language of the community; or enabling students to develop language, literacy, and academic skills in an additional language. Although most programs serving language-minority students are subtractive in nature, using the home language to serve language and academic achievement in the majority language, dual-language immersion programs are growing in popularity. Dual-language immersion programs and immersion programs serving language-majority students reflect additive approaches to bilingual education, and their students have been found to perform as well as or better than their monolingual peers.
Becoming biliterate requires students to develop skill in engaging with and making sense of texts in two languages that vary both orally and in their writing systems. Developing word-level and text-level skills in two languages involves a common set of cognitive processes that may transfer across languages. Instructional practices promoting language, literacy, and academic achievement in both languages include high-quality literacy instruction, translanguaging within classrooms, content-based instruction, and fostering responsive classroom climates that value linguistically diverse students and their home cultures.
Bilingual Two-Way Immersion Programs Benefit Academic Achievement