In this chapter, we describe the efforts of a bilingual community to respond to the diverse second language learning needs of its population and the role of immersion education in these efforts. The community we examine is the Basque Country in Spain. We describe a number of educational alternatives that are available community-wide, rather than on one specific alternative or the program offered in a specific school. We believe that the challenge of providing students with educational opportunities to acquire bilingual proficiency across a whole community raises issues that other communities may face but are not often discussed in the literature on immersion, such as the roles played by different sectors of education – including government agencies, teacher-training institutions and researchers – in developing effective alternative second language programs.

Immersion in at-risk languages

The present case study concerns immersion in a language that is at risk. Although programs for at-risk languages share some important features with other forms of immersion, they also differ in a number of important respects. First and foremost, they seek to maintain and revitalize languages that have become subordinate to more dominant languages (Spanish in the case of Basque) and that may even be at risk of extinction because more and more members of the target language group are learning the dominant language as a first language (see Genesee, 1987, Chapter 5). Immersion in the at-risk language is thus often part of a more extensive plan for language revitalization.