Language Skills and Identity in Bilingual Education : A case study of a bilingual primary school in England

A common concern for bilingual education is that while it supports additional language learning, it detracts from students’ progress with the society’s dominant language. Several studies in this flourishing area of research have focused on bilingual educational settings using the dominant societal language and a language of that is the native one of the students. Findings are hard to generalise to other educational settings, due to the inherent heterogeneity of bilingual education, including not only the choice of languages used but also the amount and type of exposure to each of them. Here we report on the first stage of a longitudinal study of students in a bilingual primary school in England which uses English, the dominant societal language, and French, a foreign language which is not the home language of any sizeable group of students in the school. In the quantitative part of this research we report that primary school students were achieving progress with foundational language skills in English within the expected range, and that this was the case both for monolingual students as well as children who had an additional home language. In the qualitative part we report on the role which bilingual education can play in the construction of students’ broader multilingual identities. The emerging picture is one where students in this type of bilingual setting are not negatively impacted in their progress with the dominant societal language, and in fact experience positive changes thanks to the formation of a multilingual identity. ∗ Wewould like to thank the students who took part in this research and their parents. We are grateful to the school that approved our research project and embraced it enthusiastically. ©2021 Katsos, Gibson, Lorge, Müller, Öztürk, Reynolds, Wilson and Forbes This is an open-access article distributed by Section of Theoretical & Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge under the terms of a Creative Commons Non-Commercial License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0). Language Skills and Identity in Bilingual Education 1 Defining Bilingual Education Bilingual education is a broad, umbrella term which ‘refers to any school program in which more than one language is used in the curriculum to teach non-language academic subject matter’ (Bialystok 2018: 667). Bialystok also makes an important distinction between bilingual education and the education of bilingual children (which often overlap). Within this broad term, as defined above, there are a range of ‘types’ of bilingual education. One type of bilingual education is often defined more narrowly as involving ‘the native language of the student and the dominant societal language’ (Wright 2013: 598) which is often considered as a form of support for minority language students. This is particularly common in the USA (e.g. bilingual English-Spanish education programmes for Hispanic children). The most commonly reported partner language in bilingual education programmes in the USA is Spanish, which represented over 90% of the dual language programmes reported by schools in a survey completed by McGraw Hill Education (2017). A broader definition of bilingual education is that it ‘aims to promote bilingual (or multilingual) competence by using both (or all) languages as media of instruction for significant portions of the academic curriculum’ (Genesee 2004: 548). This definition would include bilingual education or content and language integrated learning (CLIL) programmes which are common across various countries in Europe. In many such cases instruction is in the students’ mother tongue / national language and a foreign language (most commonly, English). These programmes are often driven by economic arguments or ideologies of internationalisation, especially in non-Anglophone countries where English is involved. There is another category of bilingual education programmewhich is often linked to the revitalisation of minority (often indigenous) languages through acquisition planning (Cooper 1989). The aim here is to increase the number of speakers of the minority language through education in order to help preserve and promote it. Some examples are Welsh, Catalan and Basque. 2 Effects of Bilingual Education 2.1 Language and literacy The above contexts all differ widely in terms of the structure of bilingual education programmes (e.g. in terms of curriculum time spent in each language), the demographic profiles of the students (including their exposure to one/both languages outside of the classroom and socioeconomic status), students’ attitudes towards the languages, and the political and linguistic ideologies underpinning bilingual education, so it is difficult to generalise findings. However, the below sections outline some of the existing evidence on the effects of bilingual education. It is important to note that the majority of these studies have been conducted in the USA context and therefore may refer to a particular ‘type’ of bilingual education programme. In terms of language and literacy, Bialystok (2018) reviewed research evaluating the outcomes of bilingual education for language and literacy levels and academic