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Article published In:
Language Immersion Education: A research agenda for 2015 and beyond
Edited by Diane J. Tedick and Siv Björklund
[Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education 2:2] 2014
► pp. 288–302

One-way immersion in Europe

Historic, current, and future perspectives on program implementation and student population

| University of Vaasa

One-way immersion programs were originally designed to provide monolingual majority language speakers a good mastery of a second, foreign, heritage, or indigenous language. This article provides a brief overview of the design of one-way-immersion programs as part of bilingual education in Europe by presenting some of the immersion programs from the following contexts: Basque country, Catalonia, Finland, Ireland and Wales. The implementation of these programs in different European contexts is analysed by looking at different functions of the programs and demographic characteristics in their student populations. The article concludes with a discussion on perspectives about and challenges for one-way immersion programs in the future.

Keywords: one-way immersion, Basque immersion, Swedish immersion, Catalan immersion, immersion in Europe, immersion program models, Irish immersion, Welsh immersion
Published online: 12 September 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jicb.2.2.09nis
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