A Tale of Four Teachers: A Study of an Australian Late-entry Content-based Programme in Two Asian Languages Heather Lotherington Faculty of Education, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada This article summarises the results of a multidimensional study of a content-based bilingual education programme piloted in a suburban high school in Melbourne in which specialist subjects taught in Chinese and Vietnamese were offered to Grades 9 and 10 students optionally enrolled in the Chinese–English or Vietnamese–English stream. The study incorporated a coordinated action research methodology in which four participating specialist teachers documented their teaching progress, problems, interventions and reactions which provided the basis for regular shared discussions. The principal researcher, who participated in the meetings, documented the collective progress of the course, focusing particularly on biliteracy acquisition. Problems faced and lessons learned over the pilot year are documented here. Introduction Over the course of the 1998 school year in the state of Victoria, Australia, a small focus group comprising bilingual teachers at a suburban high school in Melbourne and researchers at the Language and Society Centre at Monash University1 met regularly to discuss and document the progress of an innovative pilot bilingual programme. The study2 brought together the interests and expertise of collaborating researchers involved in bilingual education with the multiple aims of documenting late entry content-based education, evaluatively profiling biliteracy development in a secondary education context, and developing teachers’ problem- solving skills through action research. The teachers, committed to promoting bilingualism in order to improve educational prospects for their students, were all native level speakers of the language they taught in addition to English. Two languages were offered through content-based study of curricular subjects: Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese. Students were enrolled in either the Vietnamese-English or the Chinese-English streams of the bilingual programme. Four teachers actively involved in bilingual education at the high school voluntarily participated in the study; their names and that of the high school have been changed to maintain anonymity. Perspectives explored in the study included those of the teachers, who discussed their own as well as their fellow teachers’ issues, problems, decisions, solutions