Bilingualism and successful learning
These five inquiries examine the research on bilingualism and bilingual students, and what it tells us about teaching and learning.
Research over the past 50 years has revealed the many potential advantages of bilingualism, but it has also shown that the key to securing those advantages for bilingual students is to build effectively on the linguistic knowledge they already have. This relates to the principle of language interdependence – the fact that knowledge of one language helps students to learn another.
The challenge for teachers, particularly in mainstream classrooms, is to work out how to support students’ ongoing bilingual development and its positive effects, even if they don’t know the languages concerned.
