Abstract

Bilingual education is one of the fastest growing disciplines within applied linguistics. This book includes the work of 20 specialists working in various educational contexts across Europe, Latin America and North America to create a volume which is both comprehensive in scope and multidimensional in its coverage of current bilingual initiatives. The central themes of this volume, which draws on past experiences of bilingual education, include issues in language use in classrooms at elementary, secondary and tertiary levels; participant perspectives on bilingual education experiences; and the language needs of bi- and multilingual students in monolingual schools. This collection will be of interest to teachers and administrators in bi- and multilingual education programs, as well as scholars working in the field of language education.

The editors of this book have done a brilliant job: bringing together a team of international specialists in bilingual and multilingual education, ranging from primary to tertiary education, and having them focus on theoretical and practical issues. This book is a must-read for researchers, teachers and education officials!

By engaging with the sheer variety of perspectives and initiatives in BE contained in this volume, this contribution delivers a wealth of information and provides the reader with a thorough grasp of BE and the options available to professional educators. It is an exceptional resource for those seeking research topics in BE, and raises several questions at the forefront of the field, thus providing concrete topics for discussion.

Christian Abello-Contesse is Associate Professor at the Universidad de Sevilla, Spain, where he teaches courses in second language acquisition, foreign-language teaching methodology, bilingualism and multilingualism, bilingual education and intercultural communication.

Paul M. Chandler is Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Languages and Literatures of Europe and the Americas at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA. His areas of interest are teacher development, second language reading and second language acquisition.

María Dolores López-Jiménez is Assistant Professor at Pablo de Olavide University in Seville, Spain. Her main research interests include vocabulary teaching and learning, materials design and evaluation, and second language acquisition.

Rubén Chacón-Beltrán is Associate Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Madrid, Spain, where he teaches undergraduate courses in English as a foreign language and sociolinguistics, and graduate seminars in bilingualism and language policy.

Thought-provoking, insightful, updated collection of papers that reflect upon actual classroom praxis at various levels. The contribution these articles make to the understanding and setting up of a scholarly discussion on educational, multicultural and multilingual matters is vast, varied and far-reaching. A real must for scholars and interested audiences.