VietTESOL International Convention 2026

Bilingual education is frequently invoked in policy discourse as if it denoted a stable and self-evident educational model. In practice, however, policies described as bilingual may refer to English expansion, English-medium instruction, compulsory second-language learning, or a wider language-in-education settlement. This article examines this ambiguity through a comparative policy analysis of Vietnam, Taiwan, and Singapore. It asks how bilingualism is represented as a policy problem, how responsibility for implementation is assigned to schools and teachers, and what Singapore’s long-standing bilingual arrangement reveals about the limits of English-oriented reform in the other two countries. Drawing on official policy documents and related governmental materials, the study uses Bacchi’s (2009) “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach and policy instrument analysis to examine the construction and operationalisation of bilingualism across the three systems. The analysis shows that Vietnam frames bilingualism as a staged project of making English a second language in schools; Taiwan frames bilingualism more explicitly through competitiveness, internationalisation, and workforce mobility; and Singapore institutionalises bilingualism through a functional allocation between English and Mother Tongue Languages rather than through system-wide bilingual instruction. The article argues that bilingual reform should not be equated with the expansion of English or EMI. Its durability depends on institutional design: the allocation of language functions, teacher capacity, curriculum and assessment alignment, and differentiated support for schools with unequal resources. Singapore is therefore treated not as a model for policy transfer, but as a counterpoint that clarifies the distinction between institutionalised bilingualism and bilingual instruction.