Bilingual education searching for promising didactic proposals

In the Basque context, the English-French bilingual education systems from Canada and Quebec are considered an indispensable reference for the Basque-Spanish and Basque-French bilingual schools, which, for the approximately last 40 years, constitute a keystone for the revitalization process of the Basque language (Zalbide, 1998). One of the crucial contributions of English-French bilingual education was to confirm that it was possible to successfully provide schooling in a second language, given some sociolinguistic, didactic, and psycholinguistic conditions. Research on French immersion showed that not only would children successfully develop the L2 or language of instruction, but also the L1 or family language and moreover, positive academic results would be obtained (Genesee, 2006). From the Basque perspective, these findings marked a milestone to support immersion schooling in Basque for Spanish or French L1 children and obviously constituted a very powerful argument in order to defend a similar system for the Basque Country (Idiazabal, 2003). It should be noted that in this new context of bilingual education and more specifically immersion education, the specificity of the Basque case was and still is that one of the languages involved is a minority language. We consider that this is not a minor fact since the Basque case is considered a very interesting example of bilingual and immersion education from the perspective of minority language education (Idiazabal et al., 2008; Cenoz, 2009). One of the core assumptions for immersion pedagogy was that children should be provided as much contact and input with the immersion language as possible and this implied that the family language should not be present in the classroom or that its use should be minimal, keeping the language of immersion and the family language separate. This is what is called the monolingual instructional approach (Cummins, 2008). However, recent research not only in immersion but also in other bilingual and multilingual approaches proposes going beyond these assumptions and adopting a more bilingual or even multilingual didactic perspective. Cummins claims that new opportunities appear for bilingual instructional strategies in order to promote crosslinguistic transfer in bilingual students. Cummins not only mentions translations, but he also refers to the use of students’ L1 in very precise stages in the production of dual language identity texts. A bilingual or even multilingual didactic perspective is also adopted by the socalled plural approaches to languages and cultures (Troncy, 2014), which supports teaching and learning activities that imply the use of more than one linguistic variety (i.e., more than one language but also more than one variety within a single language). One of the main proposals within this approach is that children need to work with more than one language together and the core type of activity is the comparison across languages in metalinguistic activities (Candelier et al., 2012). In our opinion, the paper by Naqvi et al. (2014) can be included in this trend toward bilingual and multilingual didactics. By offering a compact synthesis of diverse types of data (video observations, questionnaires, students’ responses etc.), it permits to go beyond the “monolingual solitude assumption” in Spanish (L2)English (L1) bilingual education. Naqvi et al. show that dual language book reading sessions provide many opportunities to work on the similarities and differences between Spanish and English and by doing so, they clearly enhance the development of metalinguistic awareness. Another type of activity studied in the paper refers to video-literacy projects in which children use both L1 and L2 as a strategy to foster cross-linguistic transfer. Overall, a more integrated model of language teaching and learning is proposed in order to exploit cross-linguistic transfer. And this requires several didactic challenges, i.e., new models of task design and strategies to successfully combine L1 and L2 in classroom activities. Another didactic approach that is very in line with the previous ideas is the integrated didactics of languages. It consists on the design of multilingual curricula and teaching materials, and according to Cavalli (2005), its origins can already be found in 1973, when the Council of Europe claimed that the efforts to establish the links between the teaching of the mother tongue and the teaching of other languages were far from being enough. So language teachers should be able to coordinate their pedagogical activities and base their teaching on common linguistic principles. Roulet (1980) specifies that the coordination between languages covers the curricula and teaching materials, linguistic terminology, and the