As the number of English language learners in U.S. schools increases, experts continue to seek ways to effectively educate these students. Those who argue for English immersion and for other practices emphasizing English-only instruction believe that this approach avoids segregating language learners, promotes assimilation of immigrants, and helps students learn English as quickly as possible. Bilingual education, they feel, divides society and limits Latinos' opportunities. These supporters cite evidence of ineffective bilingual programs and stories of immigrant children who have succeeded in immersion programs (Chavez, 2000; Duignan, n.d.).
Many second-language acquisition experts and others counter that immersion programs have not been proven effective. They believe that bilingual education programs, which provide initial instruction in students' first language, are more successful in helping students acquire English (Krashen, 2000; Mora, 2002; Slavin & Cheung, 2004). For example, Crawford (1998) found that students in programs that stressed native language instruction had much larger increases in English reading and math skills than did students in English immersion programs or programs that stressed early transition to English.
My experiences teaching English language learners in three different settings help to explain why bilingual education programs sometimes work and sometimes do not. These experiences demonstrate what advocates on both sides of the issue often fail to realize: that not all bilingual programs are the same; that no program will guarantee success for all students in all settings; and that English language learners often receive confusing and inconsistent instruction whether their program is called bilingual or immersion.
A Dual Language Classroom
My first experience with bilingual education was in a dual language immersion school in Wisconsin. In this setting, native English speakers and native Spanish speakers learned together in the same classroom. Instruction began in Spanish for both English and Spanish speakers. As students acquired a good reading base in Spanish, we gradually incorporated English. By 5th grade, students received half of their instruction in each language.
Unlike transitional bilingual education, which views native language instruction as a means to learn English, dual language programs aim to produce students who are fluent in both languages. According to speech-language experts Roseberry-McKibbin and Brice (2004), studies have shown that English language learners in dual immersion programs have higher academic achievement than do those taught in English immersion programs. By taking an enrichment approach rather than a remedial approach, dual language immersion produces bilingual and biliterate students who can switch effortlessly from one language to the other.
As I worked in this school, I realized why the dual language immersion approach was successful. No one group had the dominant language—the language of power. The native Spanish speakers felt empowered, not only because they acquired literacy and found success in their own language, but also because they were models for the English-speaking students. The English-speaking students also benefited by acquiring a second language at an early age.
In 1st grade, these students were exciting to teach. They spurred one another on. Classroom discourse naturally alternated between English and Spanish, unlike the conversation in many bilingual classrooms where students never speak English except when talking to the teacher.
Socially, this approach had powerful implications. At the beginning of the year, I saw many shy Spanish speakers who congregated together. As I taught these students to read in Spanish, they became more confident in their Spanish literacy skills, but they were still reluctant to use English. Slowly, however, the native Spanish speakers and the native English speakers began to communicate with one another. As students interacted, they learned English and Spanish in meaningful ways, communicating with their peers on the playground and in the classroom. When one of the English speakers had a birthday party at her house, I had the opportunity to see the children interact outside the classroom. I was surprised when Leah, a native Spanish speaker whom I had never heard use English, spoke in fluent English as she communicated with her English-speaking friends at the party.
Bilingual Education Inconsistently Applied
When I left Wisconsin, I was enthusiastic about dual immersion bilingual education and all that it could accomplish. My next school district, in Colorado, had recently adopted a transitional bilingual model in which Spanish-speaking students would acquire literacy in their primary language and then gradually achieve literacy in English.
I took a job as a 1st grade bilingual teacher. Most of my students were Spanish speakers who did not know any English. I was surprised to discover that they had no letter-recognition skills—in fact, no literacy skills at all. I soon figured out that the problem stemmed from their kindergarten experience the year before.
The district-adopted transitional bilingual policy had not yet filtered down from the central office to the school level, so my 1st grade students had not received reading readiness instruction in their primary language. Instead, the school had placed all of the native Spanish speakers in one kindergarten class with an English-speaking teacher who made little effort to make English comprehensible to them. These students spoke Spanish in almost all settings of their lives. But for a few hours each day, they came to school and listened to a lady speak English. The input they received was similar to what we might hear from Charlie Brown's teacher—“wa, wa, wa, wa.” Although some of my students had learned their colors and how to say words like bathroom, they had no phonemic awareness or letter-recognition skills in either language.
When I tested the students' knowledge of letter-sound correlation, I got another shock. I asked students which words started with the A sound and gave them some examples of Spanish words from alphabet posters with corresponding pictures. The students insisted that manzana started with an A sound, abeja started with a B sound, helado started with an I sound, and so on. I was confused. Why couldn't the students hear the beginning sounds of these words?
Then I realized what had happened. Manzana means apple in English; abeja means bee; and helado means ice cream. In kindergarten, the students had memorized the pictures that go with the letters in the English alphabet. They had never learned how to say apple, bee, or ice cream in English; they had translated the words into Spanish. They had never learned to hear the sounds; they had merely learned that the picture of a manzana somehow matches the symbol A.
Although the students' kindergarten instruction had given them almost no prereading skills, I was eager to teach them to read in Spanish, as directed by the district's new bilingual policy. We spent hours every day working on letter sounds. Simultaneously, I taught other core subjects (math, social studies, and science) in Spanish, gradually incorporating more English and developing the students' oral English skills as we discussed concepts from these subjects.
As the students and I struggled through the first four months, I began to wonder when they would make progress learning to read in any language. Many of them still struggled with blending letters. Eventually, however, it all seemed to click. A few students started to read, and the rest soon followed.
Because Spanish is a completely phonetic language, when students know how to decipher syllables they can decode almost anything. Learning how to read in Spanish empowered my students. After their Spanish literacy skills became more solid and their oral English skills improved, many of them began to read in English. This time, the goal seemed easily attainable because all their reading skills from Spanish transferred to English. This experience confirmed the views of language experts who have found that once we can read in one language, we do not need to learn how to read all over again (August, Calderon, & Carlo, 2001; Krashen, 2000). In addition, my students had the English vocabulary to comprehend what they read; they were delighted when they could sound out C-O-W and know what the word meant.
Although this method of teaching was not quite as natural or easy as teaching in the dual language school in Wisconsin, it still worked and gave me many reasons to support transitional bilingual education. If I had taught the students to read in English initially, it would have taken much longer for them to acquire literacy. Because I taught core subjects in Spanish, students could keep up with grade-level content because they could understand what they were learning. Their success learning in one language motivated them to succeed in the second.
Another 1st grade class of English language learners in the school that year had a different experience. After their bilingual teacher left early in the year, they received instruction from a full-time substitute who spoke no Spanish. When my students went on to 2nd grade, their teachers told me that they were much better prepared and spoke and wrote better English than the students who had been taught in an English-only class. My students had acquired English in a natural way, and they had transferred their Spanish reading skills smoothly to English.
Incoherent Programs
Later, I moved to 4th grade at a different school in the same district. I was excited by the change; I wanted to see firsthand how older students were gaining English literacy skills.
To meet the needs of the bilingual students, the school had decided to group the 4th and 5th grade English language learners for reading. Two teachers would teach a group of 4th and 5th graders who were performing on or near grade level, which included many native Spanish speakers who had transitioned to English. Another teacher would teach a group of Spanish-speaking students who had just moved to the United States and were not ready to transition. I would teach the group of students who were just beginning to transition to English literacy. I was excited about teaching these students, assuming that like my 1st graders, they would just need a little push to master learning and reading in English.
Unfortunately, the reality soon became clear. All the students in my reading group were performing far below grade level and lacked many reading skills. They did not have the same motivation that the 1st graders had displayed. How had the bilingual program failed them? Why, by the time they reached 4th grade, were these 30 kids still reading at the 1st grade level or below?
Ineffective Grouping
At first, I thought that the practice of grouping our students by language level for reading instruction sounded wonderful; the students' needs would be similar and I would be able to teach them more effectively. Unfortunately, my group included not just the bilingual students, but all students who came into 4th or 5th grade reading at the 1st grade level or below. This meant that the class contained struggling English readers who spoke Spanish, the school's few Vietnamese and Cambodian students, and many of the special education and emotionally disturbed students.
A class that could have helped students transition into reading in English became the class to dump all the students with “needs.” But just because these students struggled to read did not mean that they struggled to read for the same reasons. Effective instruction for the class's English language learners would not necessarily address the needs of other struggling students with different needs.
Even the English language learners in the group had experienced many different instructional environments. Some had attended the same school since kindergarten and had received Spanish language reading instruction through 1st grade, with a transition to English in 2nd grade. Others were new immigrants to the United States. Some had recently moved from other districts or from other schools in the same district that were unable to staff bilingual classes. Because of high mobility rates, some students had switched several times between Spanish language and English language instruction.
Reading Skills and Background Knowledge
Reading involves many complex processes, and learning to read presents extra challenges for second-language learners. August and colleagues (2001, 2003) discovered that English language learners acquire decoding skills easily, but they struggle more than native English speakers in their reading comprehension. By the time these students read to the end of a sentence or a book, they may have no idea what either means. They have a hard time monitoring their comprehension.
My 4th and 5th graders' struggles confirmed August's observations. My students' biggest challenge was their lack of background knowledge and vocabulary. They had no frame of reference to understand the books we studied. I often heard such questions as “What is the ocean?,” “What is a zoo?”, and “Do we really have mountains near here?” Because many of the students had never left their neighborhoods, a book about life under the sea posed difficulties for them. They not only had to work on their decoding, fluency, and vocabulary, but they also had to comprehend content that was outside their realm of experience.
Second-language acquisition experts say that developing students' first language gives them subject-matter knowledge that enables them to comprehend what they read and hear in English (Krashen, 2000). I found that many of my students had not been given the opportunity to develop skills in any language. Perhaps the students had been transitioned too quickly, before they developed solid reading skills and background knowledge in Spanish, and thus they did not have fully formed skills to transfer over to English. Consequently, they had not experienced success that would motivate them. Instead of creating bilingual students, we had created students who could speak two languages to some degree but who could not read or comprehend academic material in either.
Success in Spite of Frustration
In spite of the barriers that the system had put in their way, many of my students learned and progressed. Hard work and belief in students can accomplish a lot. And a few students far exceeded expectations. What accounted for their success?
Maria and Marcos, two 5th graders in my reading class, had only been in the United States a little more than a year, but they were ready to transition to reading in English. Both progressed to near grade-level proficiency in one year, surpassing other students who had been in the country longer.
One of the reasons Maria and Marcos succeeded was that they had a solid education in their native language. They were fluent readers in Spanish and had strong background knowledge. Researchers have found that the amount of formal schooling a student receives in the first language is the strongest predictor of how that student will perform academically in the second (Thomas & Collier, 2002) and that the most successful English language learners are those who have maintained bilingualism and a strong connection with their family's culture (Rumbaut & Portes, 2001). Marcos and Maria could connect whatever they read about in English with knowledge and concepts that they had learned in Spanish. Thus, they felt successful and motivated.
Experience Supports Research
For English language learners, becoming fluent in English is a challenging process that cannot be accomplished in a single year. Because of accountability pressures, the debate that surrounds bilingual education, and the panic to get students on grade level, schools often push students rapidly into English-only instruction, where they flounder or get labeled as needing special education.
My experience suggests that students acquire a second language most easily when they develop literacy skills and content knowledge in their native language, have opportunities to interact with English-speaking peers, and learn with students of different ability levels. We need to remember that the fastest way is not necessarily the most effective way. When advocates push for English fluency at any cost, they fail to realize that the cost may be students' literacy and academic development.
