Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2008
CLIL and Immersion Classrooms: Applied Linguistic Perspectives (www.ichm.org/clil/) is one of a number of research networks (ReNs) established under the auspices of AILA. It was founded after the first CLIL Symposium, held in Vienna in July 2005. The network connects applied linguists who focus their research interests on educational settings which make use of an additional language for teaching and learning diverse content areas and thus engage in content and language integrated learning, or CLIL. Thus, this ReN provides researchers with a platform for presenting investigations on any type of classroom-based learning undertaken in a language other than the learners' first or previous language of education. This includes not only typical immersion settings of immigrant learners being integrated into mainstream education and use of the dominant language but also, and more centrally, the more recent phenomenon of using a foreign language as the medium of instruction, which has become an increasingly popular teaching approach at all educational levels in Europe and beyond, as recent publications show (Eurydice Report 2006; Marsh & Wolff 2007; Wilkinson & Zegers 2007).