The present study was carried out in French immersion classrooms in an urban Quebec school board that is increasingly characterised by the heterogeneity of its Frenchdominant, English-dominant, and French/English bilingual student population. The study explored the extent to which a bilingual read-aloud project would (1) raise teachers' awareness of the bilingual resources of their students, (2) encourage students' crosslinguistic collaboration, and (3) promote teachers' cross-curricular and cross-linguistic collaboration. The participants were three English and three French teachers of three classes of six-to eight-year-old children. The French and English teachers of each class read aloud to their students from the same storybooks over four months, alternating the reading of one chapter in the French class and another in the English class. The data consist of (1) video recordings of the read-aloud sessions and discussion about the stories, (2) interviews and stimulated-recall sessions with the teachers, and (3) student focus-group interviews as well as a student questionnaire administered at the end of the project. Results are reported in terms of the enthusiasm of both students and teachers for the project, the opportunities it created for teachers and students to focus on both language and content, and the extent to which teachers collaborated to do so.Keywords: bilingual education; awareness-raising; collaboration; literacy practices; second language learning; cross-linguistic contrasts; immersion; reading aloud Introduction Over 40 years ago, an innovation in second language (L2) education began in the Englishmedium schools of St Lambert, a suburb of Montreal (see Lambert & Tucker, 1972). Anglophone children, a linguistic minority in the province of Quebec, had been receiving instruction in French, the majority language of the province, as a separate subject taught for a few hours a week. The new approach delivered a substantial portion of the academic school day through the medium of French, with the goal of improving the children's mastery of their L2. This subsequently triggered a rapid proliferation of such programmes across Canada, and immersion programmes have since been developed to teach a variety of languages in a wide range of contexts around the world (Johnson & Swain, 1997).This educational initiative became the prototypical model for immersion education. A key element of the model is a pedagogical approach that assumes homogeneous first language (L1) groups with similar L2 needs. However, as Swain and Lapkin (2005) have recently noted, (1) immersion students no longer necessarily share the same L1, and (2) the target language can no longer be accurately referred to as the L2 for many students, who increasingly represent culturally diverse and multilingual school populations. At the * Corresponding author. Email: roy.lyster@mcgill.ca There is a move towards dropping the prohibition against using students' L1 in the immersion classroom and instead developing practices more in line with findings ...

The current paper describes a study that sought to determine the beliefs, practices, and needs of parents living in Montreal, Quebec, who were raising their children bi/multilingually. The parents (N = 27) participated in a total of nine focus group and individual interviews in which they discussed their family language policies (language ideologies, practices, and actions taken to maintain a language). Through rounds of deductive and inductive coding and analysis, family language policies regarding English and/or French were compared with policies regarding heritage languages. The participants' family language policies were further examined in light of Quebec's official language policy of interculturalism. Findings indicate a complex co-existence of family and official language policy in which parents both support Quebec's official language policy by converging towards French as a common public language and questioning the policy's stance on official institutional support for heritage languages.

This classroom intervention study investigated the effects of biliteracy instruction on Grade 2 students' morphological awareness in French and English. Three pairs of partner teachers (French/English) participating in a professional development project co-designed and implemented biliteracy tasks across their French and English classes, which together comprised a total of 80 students identified as dominant in either French or English or as French-English bilinguals. The biliteracy instruction integrated a linguistic focus on derivational morphology with a thematic focus on illustrated storybooks. Before and after the intervention, separate measures of morphological awareness in French and English were administered to a subsample of their students (n = 45) as well as to a comparison group of students (n = 20) not receiving the instruction. The experimental group significantly outperformed the comparison group in French, but not in English, yet when students' language dominance was accounted for in the English measure, English-dominant students in the experimental group significantly outperformed their counterparts in the comparison group.French abstract at end.

This article serves as the introduction to this special issue of Language Teaching Research on content-based language teaching (CBLT). The article first provides an illustrative overview of the myriad contexts in which CBLT has been implemented and then homes in on the five studies comprising the special issue, each conducted in a distinct instructional setting: two-way Spanish-English immersion in the USA, English-medium 'nature and society' lessons taught at a middle school in China, English-medium math and science classes in Malaysian high schools, English-medium history classes in high schools in Spain, and 'sheltered instruction' classes for English language learners in US schools. In spite of such divergent contexts, the five studies converge to underscore the pivotal role played by teachers in CBLT and the concomitant need for professional development to support them in meeting some of the challenges specific to CBLT.

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