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The two-way students scored 3.7 on a 0-6 scale and the mainstream students scored 2.4. Native speakers in the mainstream scored 3.4, below the level of the two-way Hispanic children. Before calling this a victory for two-way, however, there are problems:
| 1. | Two-way students were given the same test the previous semester and scores were identical. There were, therefore, no gains. |
| 2. | Only 11 students were tested in the two-way program and only seven in the mainstream program. |
| 3. | We do not know if the Hispanic students were ever limited in English. |
| 4. | The mainstream classroom was an inferior pedagogical environment: “Materials were painfully lacking in the mainstream classroom, to the extent that there was only one Big Book in the entire room, and the other few books there were occupied less than a quarter of one bookshelf. The readers the students used in the small reading groups were kept by the teacher, and were only available to the students during reading time ... In both classrooms of the bilingual program, in contrast, there were well over twenty Big Books in Spanish and in English ...” (p. 88). Native speakers of English in the two-way program did much better than those in the mainstream program (4.4 versus 3.4). This could be because of the value of the two-way program or the impoverished print environment of the mainstream classroom (or both). Perhaps the correct generalization is that two-way students did better than those who were in submersion in a print-deprived environment. |
Castillo (2001) reported that “native Spanish speakers” ages 5 to 8 (K-2) in two-way did far better than comparisons in a “regular classroom” (41st vs. 11th percentile on ITBS Reading), but only four children were in the comparison group. We do not know if the “native Spanish speakers” were limited in English (although it appears that those in the submersion class were). Results were also quite variable: the standard deviation for the two-way group was 26.
The two-way students also did better than the full group of comparison students (mean = 34, sd = 27); 30 out of 34 of the comparison children were native speakers of English.
Castillo examined the impact of years in the two-way program, reporting very high scores the first year, and lower scores for those in the program longer. The very high score after grade 1 is unusual, and suggests that not all the children were limited in English.
Table 1
Years in Program and ITBS Scores (percentiles)
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from: Castillo (2001)
The results of this study are difficult to interpret. To be sure, two-way children did better than comparisons, both Spanish and English native speakers. But there were only four children in the Spanish-dominant comparison group, and scores were very high at the beginning but lower for those in the program two and three years. The data could mean that two-way is highly successful, and it could mean the opposite, that children begin the program with high levels of English proficiency and then get worse. In addition, the lower scores could also be a result of high-scoring children exiting the program.
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