Bilingual schooling and language proficiency policy considerations for Australia

Executive summary

Australia has long recognised the importance of language learning for cultural understanding, international engagement, multicultural recognition and vitality, and participation in the global economy. Yet despite decades of policy commitment, relatively few Australian students graduate with functional proficiency in a second language.

One key explanation lies in the structure of language programs in schools. In many cases languages are taught through short weekly lessons with limited continuity across year levels. While such programs may foster cultural awareness (though, for complicated reasons this is not always the case). Such programs rarely provide the sustained exposure necessary for significant language acquisition.

International research demonstrates that bilingual schooling through immersion models provide far stronger language outcomes. By teaching curriculum subjects through another language for a substantial portion of the school day, bilingual programs dramatically increase language exposure and embed language learning within meaningful academic activity. In this briefing I will mention the Victorian experience, partly because I have closer familiarity with it, but also because the state has developed the largest national network of bilingual government schools offering programs in languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, German, French and Italian. These initiatives demonstrate that bilingual schooling can operate successfully within the Australian education system.

Evidence from Australia and internationally suggests several policy conclusions

• Meaningful language proficiency requires substantial instructional time and sustained exposure.
• Bilingual schooling and well-designed Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) models offer the most effective structures for achieving this.
• Language education policy should prioritise program quality rather than broad but shallow provision.
• Successful bilingual programs require strong community support and whole-school commitment.

Expanding bilingual education therefore represents a promising strategy for revitalising language learning in Australia and in the case of this Inquiry, for Asian languages specifically.

Introduction

Australia’s commitment to language learning has been repeatedly affirmed in national education policy. Languages are widely regarded as important for intercultural understanding, international engagement, and economic competitiveness. Yet participation and proficiency levels remain modest compared with many other multilingual societies. In a country whose economic and diplomatic relationships extend deeply into the Asia-Pacific region, the development of Asian multilingual capability is clearly a strategic national asset. Yet, it is a failure of past language policy efforts to neglect the role of English in Asia, and indeed of Asian Englishes. It is beyond the scope of my focus here, but this point is a serious omission given the central importance of English in the education systems of many Asian societies, and the evolution of Asian Englishes, which are extremely well documented and increasingly regarded as sources of additional identity alongside the official and sub-national languages of Asia. The prominence of English in the region has also contributed to complacency in Australian language policy, reinforcing the mistaken belief that English alone is sufficient for engagement in Asia.

One important explanation for the poor outcomes from our national efforts in the past has been the ignoring of English, both the complacency effect induced by pervasive knowledge of English and the widespread lack of appreciation of the multiple Englishes of the region.

However, in this brief paper my focus is on the design of non-English language, and mainly Asian, language programs themselves. Many schools offer language instruction through brief weekly lessons that are disconnected from the broader curriculum. These arrangements can introduce students to another language but rarely provide sufficient exposure for substantial language development. I have provided a separate paper on Language Passports which discusses proficiency questions more directly, in this paper I will focus on program design. In contrast to the majority of ‘drip feed’ or low-intensity programs, bilingual schooling integrates language learning with curriculum learning by teaching academic subjects through another language. In doing so it provides extended exposure, authentic communication contexts, and sustained engagement with the target language, while maintaining students’ knowledge, and literacy, in English.

This briefing reviews the main models of bilingual education, examines the development of bilingual schools in Victoria, and identifies policy implications for strengthening Asian language education in Australia.

Immersion and Maintenance Bilingual Education

Bilingual schooling encompasses a range of models, but two broad types are commonly distinguished.

Immersion education involves teaching academic subjects through a second language for part or most of the school day. The model emerged in Canada in the 1960s, where English-speaking students were educated partly through French. Immersion programs have since spread internationally and are widely regarded as one of the most effective forms of language education. Immersion programs exist in several forms:

• Early immersion, introduced in the first years of schooling
• Partial immersion, where instruction is divided between two languages
• Late immersion, introduced in later primary or secondary schooling.

Maintenance bilingual education, by contrast, is designed primarily for students whose home language differs from the dominant language of schooling. Its aim is to maintain and develop the first language while also ensuring full competence in the national language.

Both approaches share a central feature: two languages are used as media of instruction for academic learning.

In recent decades I have worked with UNICEF and UNESCO in Southeast Asia on the expansion of language education beyond official languages + English, to include indigenous languages (called mother tongues) and in recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in ‘mother tongue multilingual education’ (Lo Bianco, 2025). This is mostly inspired by the early and partial forms of Canadian immersion and sits alongside many international school bilingual programs which offer full immersion in English and national languages and increasingly add Chinese Mandarin or Japanese as subjects.

International research provides strong quantitative evidence of the effectiveness of immersion education. Longitudinal studies of Canadian French immersion programs have shown that students typically achieve high levels of comprehension and functional fluency in the second language while performing at or above grade level in academic subjects taught in their first language. Evaluations (summarised by Fred Genesee and colleagues) indicate that immersion students commonly reach intermediate-high levels of proficiency on recognised language proficiency scales by the end of secondary schooling, far exceeding the outcomes typically associated with conventional language classes. Australian research, such as a sequence of studies of the Bayswater West Primary School German bilingual program in Victoria continually affirm these Canadian findings.

Participation data also illustrates the scale and sustainability of immersion models. In Canada alone, more than 430,000 students are enrolled in French immersion programs, representing roughly 10–12% of all students outside French language regions such as New Brunswick and Quebec. These programs have maintained high enrolment growth for several decades, reflecting both parental demand and consistent evidence of strong academic outcomes.

Meta-analyses of bilingual education research further show that students educated through bilingual or immersion models frequently demonstrate equal or superior academic achievement compared with students in monolingual programs, particularly in literacy and metalinguistic awareness. These findings have been widely discussed in the work of scholars such as James Cummins, whose research highlights the cognitive and educational advantages of sustained bilingual development. He argues that bilingual schooling supports the transfer of conceptual knowledge across languages and contributes to deeper academic engagement when appropriately implemented. Within the Asia Pacific region Hong Kong, Singapore and increasingly some innovations in parts of South India, are becoming known for their research into cognitive and social aspects of bilingual education, with the additional attention paid to script questions that are more prominent in Asian settings that in non-immigrant settings in North America or Europe.

It is of course the case that official bilingualism in Canada creates radically different sociolinguistic conditions which assist the success of their bilingual programming, and the absence of this overarching affirmation of language constrains Australian possibilities. Taken together, the international evidence indicates that immersion and bilingual schooling provide the most reliable educational pathway to meaningful second-language proficiency within school systems, while maintaining strong academic performance in the dominant language.

Maintenance bilingual education, by contrast, is designed for students whose home language differs from the dominant language of schooling. The aim is to maintain and develop the first language while ensuring acquisition of the national language. Maintenance models are often associated with Indigenous language education or heritage/migrant language communities. Although these approaches differ in purpose, they share a central feature: two languages function as media of instruction for academic learning. The bilingual programs I describe below combine immersion (for new learners) and maintenance (for existing speakers).

Gradations Below Full Immersion

Not all bilingual programs operate at full immersion intensity. Systems often implement intermediate models.

Partial immersion divides instructional time between two languages. Schools may also create bilingual streams within otherwise monolingual institutions.

A widely used European model is Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), which involves teaching selected subjects through another language. We have several examples of good CLIL in Australian schools, and, like bilingual education, CLIL requires schools to foster collaboration across subject areas, parents to be informed about the process and consistent application.

When well designed, CLIL programs provide significantly more exposure than conventional language classes (‘drip-feed’ or low intensity models) and can support meaningful language learning.

Why Bilingual Schooling, including CLIL, Produces Stronger Language Outcomes

As noted, a substantial international research literature demonstrates that bilingual schooling produces stronger language outcomes than conventional language classes. After decades of lobbying by language researchers, we were pleased to see the World Bank acknowledge the superiority of bilingual (specifically maintenance) programming after their review of the literature, in their report Loud and Clear (World Bank, 2021). It is worth reiterating these because one of the reasons for past modest success with federal government policy promoting languages has been the relative neglect of quality and the excessive expectation of employment following completion of the program.

When achievement rates are below what policy declarations lead communities to expect and employment is scarce the credibility of policy claims is brought into question.

Time on Task Language acquisition requires extensive exposure. Traditional language classes may provide only a few hours of instruction each week, and in many cases well below this.. Bilingual programs increase exposure dramatically by using the language across multiple subjects and activities throughout the school day.

Natural and Varied Language Input When language is used to teach content subjects students encounter vocabulary and grammatical structures embedded in meaningful contexts. Language becomes a tool for communication, reasoning and knowledge construction rather than simply an object of study. Students therefore experience language across multiple registers: academic explanation, problem solving, collaborative discussion, and presentation of ideas.

Meaning-Focused Communication In immersion classrooms the primary goal is learning subject content rather than practising language forms. Students therefore use the language to solve problems, discuss ideas and engage with knowledge. This meaning-focused interaction promotes deeper language acquisition because the language is constantly used for authentic communicative purposes.

Academic Outcomes Prior to the definitional rigour the world has gained from the Canadian experience research evidence was occasionally inconclusive about the academic outcomes from two-language teaching, but for several decades now research consistently finds that immersion students typically perform as well as or better than students in monolingual programs while also developing substantial second-language proficiency.

In light of these considerations Lo Bianco and Slaughter (2019) recommended that Australian education jurisdictions should pay careful attention to how they label programs, clearly distinguishing between academically substantive efforts and programs whose aim is closer to cultural familiarisation. The latter has value and all students need to learn about and be capable in navigating a multicultural world, but it remains a recurring policy challenge that we need as a nation to expand and deepen our language programs so that a greater number achieve instructional intensity. Many Australian language programs allocate too little time to produce meaningful proficiency, but research shows that some parents are reluctant to enrol their children in full immersion programs, and instead value familiarisation-oriented programs. While these programs may contribute to cultural awareness, their limited exposure prevents students from achieving functional competence, hence sensitive discussions are required in schools given the likely heterogenous views of the community.

Overall, and from a policy perspective, the implication for policy is clear. Rather than attempting to provide minimal language instruction everywhere, education systems should prioritise fewer programs operating at higher levels of intensity and quality. Bilingual schooling and rigorous CLIL programs offer the most effective structures for achieving this depth of engagement.

Bilingual Schools in Victoria, and International Experience

Victoria has developed a significant bilingual education initiative, one which is also flexible, admitting new programs over time and modifying how existing ones operate.

Government bilingual programs currently operate in languages including Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Greek, German, French and Italian and in the past a wider range of languages was offered. Examples include:

• Richmond West Primary School —  Mandarin, also partial Vietnamese
• Clifton Hill Primary School — French for Foundation, phased Mandarin
• South Melbourne Primary School — Mandarin, not fully bilingual
• Camberwell Primary School — French
• Richmond High School — Mandarin (Enhanced Chinese)
• Ashwood High School — Mandarin and Chinese, accelerated
• Aurora School — AUSLAN
• Brunswick South Primary School — Italian

Footscray Primary School discontinued a longstanding Vietnamese bilingual program because of teacher replacement issues, and Lalor North Primary School has for 40 years-maintained a Greek/Macedonian/English joint bilingual (maintenance) program even during periods of maximum tension between the two countries associated with these languages. There are also binational school programs such as Caulfield Junior College which hosts the École Française de Melbourne (EFM), a binational program running from Prep to Grade 6, offering a French-Australian curriculum.

These schools typically operate partial immersion models, where significant portions of the curriculum are taught through the target language, so L2, the second or target language is the medium of instruction, whereas with maintenance programs and some CLIL programs (there are many dozens of CLIL models) the L1, or non-English ‘mother tongue’ is the medium of instruction.

Perhaps the enduring message here is that the range of Victorian bilingual schools demonstrate that bilingual programming can operate successfully within the Australian education system, especially when they respond to community demand.

The Canadian pioneering efforts in modern immersion education began in Quebec during the 1960s, as part of a ‘secession-stemming’ policy to grant French co-official status with English and as already noted have become an expected feature of the entire nation’s education. These programs have expanded steadily for more than five decades, demonstrating both parental demand and institutional stability. Meta-analyses of high order bilingual education, including Irish immersion in Ireland, also show that immersion students frequently demonstrate equal or superior academic outcomes, particularly in literacy development and metalinguistic awareness.

Both in Australia today and across the world in the early phases of their moves into bilingual schooling parents express concern that children’s English will suffer relative to their English educated peers. To assuage these concerns the Canadian immersion programs were accompanied by extensive research documenting outcomes, attending to problems, and continually improving the core methodology. This makes the program one of the most studied educational innovations of recent decades. As I already noted, this research has demonstrated that immersion students develop high levels of bilingual competence while maintaining strong academic performance, reassuring parents about ultimate linguistic and academic outcomes. Bilingual education, and bilingual parenting, have long and closely documented histories in Europe too, however I will here only briefly address the CLIL innovation. CLIL is less demanding of education systems and imposes a lower burden on planning, curriculum writing and teacher collaboration, but all these are still required. CLIL is found most often in subject-specific structures typical of secondary schooling so that units in, say, history or science may be taught through English or other languages, while most of the rest of the curriculum proceeds as normal. As already noted, the number of documented CLIL varieties is very large and for several years at the University of Melbourne, we trained cohorts of teachers in Asian and European languages in our preferred CLIL method, which is unit-specific, midyear intensives.

These programs illustrate how bilingual education can be implemented flexibly across diverse education systems.

Singapore operates a distinctive bilingual national education model in which English serves as the main language of instruction while students also study one of the official “mother tongue” languages, Chinese, Malay, or Tamil. Like the other models mentioned the Singapore practice is accompanied by close evaluation and monitoring research and yields exceptionally high education, literacy and academic knowledge outcomes. Finally, it is worth noting that many bilingual programs are essentially social, or justice-oriented and rights based rather than primarily academic in orientation. This is the case with those Indigenous bilingual programs in Australia which have survived despite continual policy chopping and changing (Oldfield and Lo Bianco, 2019), and bilingual education in many parts of the world also responds to remits such as federalism, national cohesion, language rights or peacebuilding in conflict zones. Bilingual models therefore demonstrate the many responses to shaping education to support both economic development and cultural identity, human rights and social cohesion and should not be restricted to one or other objective in a multicultural society with diverse needs.

Exposure Time: Why Program Structure Matters

One of the clearest explanations for immersion success lies in cumulative exposure hours, a factor highly dependent on teacher ability in both languages, in the subject matter and in the collaborative (cross subject) relations in the school. This finding, however, is a challenge for Australia.

OECD research indicates that Australian students report among the lowest weekly hours of foreign-language instruction in the comparison group, approximately 1.2 hours per week. At the same time, Australia allocates relatively high total instructional time across the school years.

This creates a striking contrast between program types:

• Conventional language class
  • Annual exposure: ~45–50 hours
  • Six year exposure: ~300 hours
• Partial immersion (50% curriculum)
  • Annual exposure: ~500 hours
  • Six year exposure: ~3,000 hours

Over the course of primary schooling, therefore, a student in a bilingual program may experience ten times more exposure to the language than a student in a conventional program. Summarising here, the following are the main factors that need to be incorporated into any plan for successful bilingual schooling into the future, and these criteria clearly require steady and sustained work.

• Teacher Expertise: teachers must possess strong language proficiency as well as subject expertise.
• Whole-School Commitment: bilingual programs require coordinated leadership and institutional support. They are, by definition, methods that work across subject areas or disciplines.
• Curriculum Design: materials must be adapted for teaching content through another language.
• Parent Engagement: parents sometimes worry about possible delays in English development. Research consistently shows such fears to be unfounded, but effective communication remains essential because there can be short term lags in acquisition of material taught in one language prior to its display in the other.
• Demonstration Schools: Early bilingual schools often serve as lighthouse institutions, helping other schools develop similar programs.

Policy Suggestions

1. Prioritise program depth and quality. Language innovation and policy should support fewer but stronger programs rather than widespread low-intensity provision. The latter may be reconceived as familiarisation and culture learning education.
2. Expand bilingual schooling and rigorous CLIL models. These structures provide the sustained exposure necessary for language proficiency, but since not all students and families will be committed to the intensity that these programs require, a choice that should be respected. All schools should offer language options of varying intensity and focus in as wide a range of languages as feasible, increasingly using Open Education collaboration modes with community providers and system Language Schools (such as the Victorian School of Languages and its equivalents in other states).
3. Support teacher development. High-quality bilingual education requires teachers with strong language proficiency and subject expertise, an important initiative would be to support teacher preparation programs at university to offer advance language/subject combination streams to ensure a sustainable future for these programs.
4. Invest in curriculum development and teaching resources. This may be a predictable point to recommend but the radical impact of AI and AI-supported learning opportunities and apps places greater demand of teachers and teaching and opens the prospect of their creative inclusion in diversified programming. Many schools already utilise such resources, their initiative should be backed by research focused curriculum innovation.
5. Avoid centralised prescription of program languages. Successful bilingual schools are typically grounded in strong community interest and engagement. Decisions about program languages should therefore reflect local community demand and support, rather than central policy mandates.
6. Strengthen demonstration schools and networks to share expertise and support program development. Localised problem solving is often the most effective and helps schools embarking in innovative programs to obtain horizontal and peer-experienced support and problem-solving mechanisms.
7. It may seem redundant in a consideration of Asia capability, but context is all important, and hence it should be noted that these suggestions sit alongside the importance of continuing to support and offer programs in community, European and other languages in response to demand. Australia’s multicultural principles are premised on the right of individuals and groups to retain active connections of culture, commerce, family and identify with their places of origin, enshrined in the legal right of dual citizenship and the principle of socially beneficial pluralism.

Conclusion

Australia’s aspiration in past language policy has been to greatly increase the number of second language programs, yet it remains the case that our society is an intergenerationally deeply multilingual one, with many hundreds of community schools engaged in language maintenance of more than 300 languages. In many cases Australia’s multicultural principles allow communities to use, teach and celebrate languages which are oppressed in their homelands. All across the country, every weekend of the year, literally thousands of communities, schools and organisations engage in active efforts of revitalisation and fostering cultural continuity in diasporas drawn from all over the world.

This demographic multilingual population has been let down by a public education system whose language offerings have been disrupted by changing policy settings and inconsistent leadership and implementation. This has been made worse by instances of top-down and unrealistic policy direction in the past.

In the absence of guiding and nationally inclusive policies the achievable and important aim would be to turn away from language programs with insufficient instructional intensity and support the expansion of bilingual lighthouse schools to model success, achievement and academic rigour in bilingual programming. As shown, international research and Australian experience suggest that meaningful language proficiency requires sustained exposure and integration with the broader curriculum.

Bilingual schooling provides such an environment. By embedding language use within everyday learning, immersion and bilingual models and maintenance bilingualism offer a powerful framework for strengthening language education appropriate to our integration into Asia and our domestic multicultural policies alongside questions of language justice for First Nations Australians.

Victoria’s flexible and growing network of bilingual schools demonstrates that these programs can operate successfully within the Australian education system. Expanding such initiatives, while maintaining high standards of quality, represents a promising pathway toward revitalising language learning in Australia. They respond clearly to the needs of the Inquiry into enhancing Australia’s Asian language and culture capabilities, but also acknowledge other language questions that our community engages with every day.

References

• Baker, C., & Wright, W. (2021). Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism (7th ed.). Multilingual Matters.
• Cummins, J. (2000). Language, power and pedagogy: Bilingual children in the crossfire. Multilingual Matters.
• Cummins, J. (2021). Rethinking the education of multilingual learners: A critical analysis of theoretical concepts. Multilingual Matters.
• Coyle, D., Hood, P., & Marsh, D. (2010). CLIL: Content and language integrated learning. Cambridge University Press.
• Genesee, F. (2004). What do we know about bilingual education for majority language students? In T. K. Bhatia & W. Ritchie (Eds.), The handbook of bilingualism. Blackwell.
• Lo Bianco, J., & Slaughter, Y. (2009). Second languages and Australian schooling. ACER.
• Lo Bianco, J., Nicolas, E., & Hannan, S. (2019). Bilingual education and second language acquisition in early childhood education: Synthesis of best evidence from research and practice. University of Melbourne.
• Lo Bianco, J. (2025). An idea whose time has come? Multilingual education in Asia-Pacific.
• Premsrirat, S., & Hirsh, D. (Eds.). Mother tongue-based multilingual education in the Asia Pacific. Multilingual Matters.
• Lo Bianco, J., Loh, J., & Shum, M. (2024). Supporting learners of Chinese as a second language: Implications for language education policy. Springer.
• Oldfield, J., & Lo Bianco, J. (2019). A long unfinished struggle: Literacy and Indigenous cultural and language rights. In J. Rennie & H. Harper (Eds.), Literacy education and Indigenous Australians: Theory, research and practice, (pp. 165–184). Springer.
• Premsrirat, S., & Hirsh, D. (Eds.). (2025). Mother tongue-based multilingual education in the Asia Pacific. Multilingual Matters.
• World Bank. (2021). Loud and Clear. Effective language of instruction policies for learning. Report No. 161577. World Bank.
• Yuan, R., & Lo Bianco, J. (2023). L2 Chinese teachers’ beliefs about engagement strategies for students in Australia: Findings from Q methodology research.

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