Did Immersion Triumph in Arizona?

It is very odd that the scientific method is consistently ignored in the debate on bilingual education.

Scientific studies comparing children in bilingual education and all-English options, including SI, show that bilingual education is a consistent winner: Children in bilingual programs do at least as well as those in all-English programs, and usually do better on tests of English reading (for reviews and meta-analyses of this research, see Willig, 1985, Greene, 1997; Slavin and Cheung, 2004).

There is, thus, an amazing consensus in the research community that bilingual education is worthwhile.²

There are good reasons why bilingual education works: It does a lot more than merely keeping children from "falling behind." It supplies background information that helps children understand what they hear and read in English. Also, learning to read in the first language is an efficient and rapid short cut to learning to read in English. Bilingual education can, in fact, be defined as a method of using the first language to accelerate second language acquisition.

Notes

(1)

Supporters of SI deny that those in bilingual education in Arizona had less English proficiency to begin with. According to Proposition 203, students under ten can be put in bilingual education programs if they have "good English language skills." Students can also be put in bilingual education if the principal and staff agree to it, but the State (Arizona Department of Education, 2004) claims that the vast majority of waivers are not granted on this basis. If so, children under ten who are in bilingual education should all be "good" in English. Their low scores, according to the State, are more evidence of the failure of bilingual education.

If, however, these children were indeed already proficient in English, one would have to argue that bilingual education converted "good" English speakers into English learners, which is preposterous. Most likely, those entering the bilingual program had lower proficiency in English and the second criterion, approval by the principal and staff, was the basis for most waivers. The issue of course can be easily settled by examining the basis on which waivers were granted and by examining initial English proficiency.

(2)

To my knowledge, only one scholar at the university level has concluded that SI is a better option, Christine Rossell (see eg. Rossell and Baker, 1996), but even Rossell points out that there are some effective bilingual programs and differences between bilingual education and SI are often small. Rossell and Baker (1996), in fact, concluded that we don't have enough data to make a policy decision. Moreover, her analyses have been criticized; her conclusion, for example, that "immersion" is better than bilingual education is based a set of studies that include only two actual bilingual-immersion comparisons in the US, and in both cases the "immersion" program included a substantial amount of instruction in the first language (Krashen, 1996).