Drawing on and extending the work presented in a companion volume, "Schooling and Language Minority Students: A Theoretical Framework," five principles are presented that represent an integration of recent empirical research in bilingualism, bilingual education, and second language acquisition to help policymakers and educators meet the educational needs of language minority students. In an introductory section, previous theoretical frameworks for language minority programs are reviewed and their deficiencies noted. In five subsequent sections, these principles and their applications for this group are discussed. The principles are that: (1) bilinguals' first and second language development is positively associated with academic achievement; (2) language proficiency is the ability to use language for both academic purposes and basic communication; (3) for language minority students the development of the primary language skills necessary to complete academic tasks forms the basis for similar proficiency in English; (4) acquisition of basic communicative competency in a second language is a function of comprehensible second language input and a supportive affective environment; and (5) the perceived status of students affects the interactions between teachers and students and among students, in turn affecting student outcomes. These principles provide the empirical support for the Contextual Interaction Theory of bilingual education, and the implications of this theory for the teaching of language minority students are examined in the remainder of the report. (MSE)