What Can We Expect of a Bilingual Programme? Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 4.

How do the expectations for bilingual educational programs of legislators, educators, parents, students and ethnic leaders match one another? What expectations are implicit in the actual practice of schools, of homes, of evaluators? How does all this fit in with what we understand about the best way for children to learn a language? This paper attempts to answer these questions and in so doing finds much that is contradictory, much that is misleading, and much that is just poorly conceived. It also suggests more reasonable approaches to the relevant issues. (Author/DB)