WP10 Teaching and Learning Bilingually: A Survey of Recent Research

Classroom-based research in bilingual settingsi is now entering its third decade. Its origins lie in studies which were carried out in bilingual education programmes in the United States in the latter half of the 1970s. Over the course of the last twenty years or so, research in this area has taken a number of significant theoretical and methodological turns. These developments have been partly due to the interdisciplinarity of the work undertaken and to intersecting currents of influence from fields of social science research which began to emerge in the 1970s, particularly conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and microethnography (see page 4 for further details). They are also due to the gradual diversification of research sites. As research began to be taken in different historical locations and in different educational contexts in Africa, Europe, North America (including Canada), South America, South and South East Asia, we began to see different kinds of research questions being asked.