Zweisprachig durch Immersionsunterricht ? Definitionen von Zweisprachigkeit und ihre Relevanz im bilingualen Sachfachunterricht

The use of authentic documents is very common in bilingual programmes, which have become more and more frequent in Swiss colleges since the middle of the 1990s. However, this material is used in a context which, especially at first sight, may appear a bit artificial. In such a tuitional setting, the way in which teachers and learners characterise the language of immersion and position themselves against it is highly significant: Is this language seen as a "foreign language", as a "partner language" or as a "personal language"? Do the students consider themselves as more and more efficient users that make use of a bi- or multilingual repertoire, and are they seen as such by their teachers? Working on data collected for a research project on immersion teaching in colleges, we will on the one hand analyse how teachers and learners define the concept of bilingualism and how this concept is used by actors in the context of immersion teaching. On the other hand, we will also consider to what extent the definition of bilingualism could be relevant for the way the students see themselves in a bilingual programme, as well as the way they are perceived from the outside.