Anne-Marie de Mejía: Introduction
Kendall King: Language Policy and Local Planning in South America: New Directions for Enrichment Bilingual Education in the Andes
María Elena García: Rethinking Bilingual Education in Peru: Intercultural Politics, State Policy and Indigenous Rights
Carlos Skliar and Ronice Muller Quadros: Bilingual Deaf Education in the South of Brazil
Anne-Marie de Mejía: Bilingual Education in Colombia: Towards an Integrated Perspective
Cristina Banfi and Raymond Day: The Evolution of Bilingual Schools in Argentina
Susan Spezzini: English Immersion in Paraguay: Individual and Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Learning and Use
JoEllen M. Simpson: A Look at Early Childhood Writing in English and Spanish in a Bilingual School in Ecuador
Claudia Lucía Ordóñez: EFL and Native Spanish in Elite Bilingual Schools in Colombia: A First Look at Bilingual Adolescent Frog Stories

The development of bilingual education in South America can be traced back to the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese colonisers in the 15th and 16^th centuries, when Catholic missionaries began their evangelisation of the indigenous peoples using local vernaculars, as well as Latin, Spanish and Portuguese. Traditionally, debate on bilingual education has been conducted in two separate arenas: majority language contexts involving international languages, such as English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and minority community contexts aimed at maintaining native Amerindian languages as well as the different Sign Languages of the South American Deaf communities.

This book presents an integrated vision of bilingual education in six South American nations: three Andean countries, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, and three 'Southern Cone' countries, Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. It includes work carried out in minority as well as majority language contexts, referring to developments in the fields of indigenous, Deaf, and international bilingual and multilingual provision.

Anne-Marie de Mejía has worked for many years in the Linguistics Department of the School of Language Sciences at Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia, where she has been Director of Postgraduate Programmes in Language and Coordinator of the Bilingualism Research Group. Her research interests include bilingual classroom interaction, the construction of bilingual curricula and processes of empowerment, and bilingual teacher development.