Latvian Bilingual Education: towards a new approach.

During the transitional period from being part of the Soviet Union, with Russian as the official state language, to an independent state within the European Union, with special language policies supporting minority languages, Latvia has developed reasonable principles of bilingual education. Nevertheless, a lot of work still needs to be done to improve teaching methods, to develop effective programmes, and to assess the multifaceted process of language use at school, including sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic analysis of educational discourse and spontaneous bilingual communication. The quality of bilingual education depends upon different factors, which are subject to various influences. Some of these are not mentioned in the models being proposed by the government, such as the pedagogical relevance of a child-centered approach, the progression in language and cultural competence of participants, mixing/overlapping/avoidance strategies of language use, attitudes of families, children and teachers, etc. The challenge for teachers of both Latvian as a second and Russian as a first language is enormous. In the future, other bilingual situations will present themselves in Latvia as well. Because of this, Latvian society must consider their entire policy towards bilingualism in the educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]