Two-Way Immersion in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland: Multilingual Education in the Public Primary School Filière Bilingue (FiBi)

The two-way immersion program Filière Bilingue (FiBi) is a choice-based educational alternative in a public school in Biel/Bienne. It integrates French-speaking, German-speaking and allophone students and strives to promote bilingualism and biliteracy in addition to grade-level academic achievement. This book presents a longitudinal study of oral proficiency development of K-4 learners in French and German (languages of schooling). Data were collected over four years and analyzed by using a mixed-method approach. Whereas the quantitative analysis shows the emergent multilinguals’ ability to use the two languages communicatively, the qualitative analysis provides some illustrative translanguaging examples of learners in their beginning stages of moving along a bilingual continuum.

Melanie Buser is the developer and coordinator of the two-way immersion curriculum « Cursus bilingue/ Bilingualer Studiengang » of the two Universities of Teacher Education HEP-BEJUNE & PHBern located in the French-speaking and German-speaking parts of Switzerland, respectively. She has a solid eight-year experience as a Secondary 1 teacher. She then continued her studies at University of Zurich where she earned her Master of Arts degree in French and English Literature and Linguistics and Philosophy in 2007. In 2015, she obtained her PhD from the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3) and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Université de Montréal (UdeM) and HEP-BEJUNE in the field of professionalization of teacher education.