Integrating Language and Content Instruction in Immersion Classrooms: Literature Review

Over the past 15 years, the percentage of children in the United States who speak a language other than English at home has been increasing. As of 2013, this was almost one in four children (KIDS COUNT Data Center, 2014). With the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, schools have felt added pressure to ensure that children learn academic content and the language of the disciplines (Koyama & Menken, 2013). With limited hours in the day, the question becomes, how does one teach content and language simultaneously? This is a question for general education classrooms with learners of English and immersion classrooms with learners of an additional language. In this literature review, I will focus most on immersion classrooms because the integration of language and content is a central, defining feature of these programs since they teach students a second language through both content-area instruction in that language and additional language instruction (Lyster, 2007). For immersion programs to be successful, their teachers must be both language and content teachers. In order to explore how this can be accomplished, I will examine the historical and contextual influences on language-content integration in immersion education, the ways in which teachers can integrate language and content, and future directions for research.