Language, culture and bilingual schooling ‐ reflections after a case study of a school

Abstract

Research into bilingual education has tended to neglect the importance of institutional practices within the schools, concentrating instead on language communities, student achievement and, less frequently, on ethnographic description. The grouping arrangements that a school makes for the allocation of children of different scholastic achievement and language proficiency and the relationship of these groupings to the curriculum and the school, are important areas which were covered by a case study of an elementary school and its community. The study raises questions about research approaches and about such dimensions as additive/subtractive and submersion/immersion. By implication, the relevance of the methodologies associated with the approaches discussed in the paper, in creating information that may be used in the endeavour to improve schooling and teaching, is also queried.