Abstract:

Bilingual education has gradually been recognized as an effective way of teaching and learning foreign languages at school. However, the issue of subject learning has remained a side focus in most studies on bilingual education since its beginning in the 1960s. In some cases, the focus was on whether students from bilingual classes performed similarly in mathematics to students from regular classes (Calvé, 1991). The results could not lead to a consensus on this issue as many factors are involved, but several authors identified similar to better performance in mathematics for pupils from bilingual programmes, as long as they had a language level of L2 which was considered as adequate to understand most of the lesson contents (Bialystok, 2001). Since the 2000s, several studies have focused more specifically on this aspect and have shown that, under certain conditions, bilingual education could have a positive impact on subject learning. For example, relying on two languages to address mathematical contents can allow students to benefit from two different approaches, to calculate differently and to process information with more intensity (Coste, 2000; Duverger, 2007; Gajo, 2007).

The present contribution focuses on didactic challenges for mathematics and L2-teaching in a German-French two-way dual immersion programme in Switzerland. This particular type of bilingual education allows students from two linguistic communities (French and German speaking) to be in the same class and relies, in particular, on bilingual interactions to develop strong language skills in both languages. In this context, we aim to observe whether phenomena leading to language and subject learning arise. Our analyses focus on three types of data: classroom observations, video-recorded peer group activities and interviews with teachers. The results show that the high exposure to spoken language helps the pupils to achieve strong L2 oral (receptive and productive) communicative competences and that a bilingual approach of mathematics education may lead to a higher processing ability of disciplinary contents. Specific training for teachers could enhance the awareness of such phenomena and increase the benefits from bilingual education.

Keywords:

Socio-communicative competences, L2, mathematics, bilingual education, two-way dual immersion.