Language skills and identity in bilingual education: a case study of a bilingual primary school in England

A common concern for bilingual education is that while it supports additional language learning, it detracts from students’ progress with the society’s dominant language. Several studies in this flourishing area of research have focused on bilingual educational settings using the dominant societal language and a language of that is the native one of the students. Findings are hard to generalise to other educational settings, due to the inherent heterogeneity of bilingual education, including not only the choice of languages used but also the amount and type of exposure to each of them. Here we report on the first stage of a longitudinal study of students in a bilingual primary school in England which uses English, the dominant societal language, and French, a foreign language which is not the home language of any sizeable group of students in the school. In the quantitative part of this research we report that primary school students were achieving progress with foundational language skills in English within the expected range, and that this was the case both for monolingual students as well as children who had an additional home language. In the qualitative part we report on the role which bilingual education can play in the construction of students’ broader multilingual identities. The emerging picture is one where students in this type of bilingual setting are not negatively impacted in their progress with the dominant societal language, and in fact, experience positive changes thanks to the formation of a multilingual identity.