Sixth International Conference on Immersion and Dual Language Education: Connecting Research and Practice Across Contexts

Paper/Best Practice Session (1 hour)

Dutch, English, German

One-Way Second/Foreign Language Immersion

High School

This paper presents data from a case study investigating the effects of Dutch-English bilingual education on the learning of German as a third language at secondary level. Specifically, it will highlight the impact on pupils’ linguistic repertoires and discuss its implications for language pedagogy with reference to literature on translanguaging.

Over the last fifteen years, Europe has seen a sharp rise in the number of schools offering bilingual or CLIL programmes in response to the high linguistic demands in many European countries, particularly those associated with advanced proficiencies in English. This rise in the provision of bilingual education means that an increasing number of foreign language teachers in Europe are now teaching their subjects to learners with bilingual proficiencies, whether as a second or as a third language. Yet, most teaching methodologies and language textbooks, including those commonly used in bilingual and CLIL settings, are based on principles from second language acquisition (SLA) rather than bilingualism and third language acquisition (TLA), which means that a monolingual rather than a multilingual norm is often taken as the starting point for curriculum design and instructional practices. In this paper, data will be presented from a case study investigating the effects of Dutch-English bilingual education on the learning of German as a third language (L3) as conducted in a secondary school in the Netherlands that offered a bilingual programme alongside its regular programme. By bringing together evidence from think-aloud tasks, lesson observations and interviews with both students and teachers, this paper will shed light on the impact of the bilingual programme on pupils’ linguistic repertoires and reveal some of the translingual practices that the pupils and teachers engaged in despite the largely monolingual norms and pedagogical principles adopted in the different foreign language (FL) classes. The implications for language (L1, L2, and L3) learning and pedagogy will be discussed with reference to the literature on translanguaging.