Resumen de Designing bilingual education: Aspects of immersion and ‘European school’ models

Hugo Baetens Beardsmore, Merril Swain

• This paper is a unique example of a comparison of achievement in second language learning as produced by two fundamentally different models of bilingual education. Canadian immersion programmes, designed primarily for language enrichment, and European School bilingual education, designed primarily for language maintenance, both promote French as a second language using totally different strategies. Test results revealed how such diversified approaches lead to highly comparable achievement scores, highlighting not the superiority of one model over the other but rather the role of the environment and the opportunity to use the target language as decisive factors in determining the nature of the model and the amount of target language input required in school.