One-way immersion in Europe: Historic, current, and future perspectives on program implementation and student population

One-way immersion programs were originally designed to provide monolingual majority language speakers a good mastery of a second, foreign, heritage, or indigenous language. This article provides a brief overview of the design of one-way-immersion programs as part of bilingual education in Europe by presenting some of the immersion programs from the following contexts: Basque country, Catalonia, Finland, Ireland and Wales. The implementation of these programs in different European contexts is analysed by looking at different functions of the programs and demographic characteristics in their student populations. The article concludes with a discussion on perspectives about and challenges for one-way immersion programs in the future.