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To meet the growing demand for multilingualism, innovative approaches to schooling have been implemented in Austria within the last decade. Two such programmes with a linguistic bias are (1) the Linz International School Auhof (LISA), an immersion school employing English as the language of instruction, and (2) the Lycée Danube, which teaches English according to the traditional high school curriculum, yet introduces French as a third language at an early stage. The present comparative and developmental study was designed to investigate the effectiveness of English instruction at LISA, the Lycée, and a regular Austrian high school. The English proficiency of 75 students drawn from two age groups was analysed on the basis of oral picture book narrations. As hypothesised, LISA students showed the highest levels of English proficiency, which underscores the advantages of immersion education. The analyses of the French-branch shed an interesting light on the new research area of trilingualism. Although below LISA-levels, Lycée students outperformed their peers from the regular high school in all linguistic domains investigated, which indicates a supportive effect of third language learning on second language proficiency. The overall composition of the test-population suggests that in addition to language learning experience, further factors, such as aptitude, motivation, attitudes, and teacher commitment, influence the language learning process.
