What is Learning in Two Languages

In the school years 2015/2016 and 2018/2019, the authors accompanied and evaluated 21 public elementary schools in Bavaria, Germany, in a research collaboration with the Bildungspakt Bayern Foundation about bilingual (German/English) instruction in German elementary schools. The goal was to investigate how high the potential of implicit teaching and learning in a bilingual primary context is. Altogether, over 900 students, parents, and 42 teachers participated in the empirical long-term study (over 5 years) Learning in Two Languages –Bilingual Elementary School English. The findings not only show that students taught in the bilingual classes have a foreign language advantage and perform at least as well in mathematics and German as students in regular classes do, but also that they have a very positive attitude towards learning English in elementary school. These findings, the study, and its theoretical background are aimed to be portrayed in short in this chapter.