Understanding Bilingual Education 2: Analyzing Types of Bilingual Education by Steve McCarty Original Source: Language Development & Education. Tokyo: Child Research Net (September 2012). Abstract The previous paper briefly introduced bilingual education and the varying purposes behind using certain languages as the medium of instruction in schools. This paper will show the types of bilingual education that are recognized according to worldwide research. Weak or strong forms of bilingual education are distinguished in terms of bilingual outcomes among students. Finally, a third paper will take a pedagogical approach in showing how various school systems can be analyzed into types of bilingual education. Lesson plans will be provided, particularly to guide university students who are non-native speakers of English in analyzing realistic cases of school systems in Japan and the world for themselves. Introduction to this paper Bilingual education, strictly speaking, involves teaching in two or more languages in schools, but for the reasons discussed in the previous paper, a bewildering variety of programs can claim a connection to the use of plural languages in education. Some school systems claim to practice bilingual education because their cultural minority students know another language aside from the one used in schools, but such programs with a monolingual medium of formal instruction do not actually represent a type of bilingual education at all. Their students may be bilingual for the time being despite, not because of, monolingual school systems that are designed to assimilate minorities. Types of Bilingual Education With such diverse aims and resulting educational systems existing in the world, a taxonomy can only classify common patterns, but based on worldwide research sources, Baker has formulated ten types of bilingual education spanning four editions of his Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. The book was considered so important that Oka (1996) translated the whole first edition into Japanese, with its title suggesting a close connection between bilingualism and second language acquisition. The author could thus make a bilingual chart adapted from Baker (2001, p. 194) and Oka (1996, p. 183):