The Acquisition of Academic English by Children in Two-Way Programs: What does the Research Say?

The results probably underestimate the advantage of the two-way group: It appears that the developmental children knew more English when they came to school (table 6). On a measure of oral English comprehension, they scored very close to the proficient level after kindergarten (3.4 on a 5 point scale, when 4 and 5 = proficient in English).

Table 6
Two-Way Versus Developmental Bilingual Education

	READING		WRITING
	2-way	develop.	2-way	develop.
2	82	68	69	52
3	94	82	88	72
4	92	88	83	72
5	97	95	87	82

	ORAL COMP.
	2-way	develop.
k	2.2	3.4
1	3.8	3.8
2	4.3	4.6
3	4.2	4
4	4.3	4.8
5	5	4.8

from: de Jong (2004)

Group Four: Comparisons to Native Speakers of English

According to Alanis (2000), Spanish-dominant students in two schools in grades 3,4, and 5 in a two-way program did as well as English-dominant students in the same program and as well as monolingual English speakers on the Texas Learning Index test of English reading. The sample size was small: in one school, only seven Spanish-dominant children were tested, in the other, only 27. In addition, it was clear that the Spanish-dominant children did not begin school with zero English: Of 18 students tested in oral English, only two were considered “non- proficient” in grade 1. Thirteen were classified as “limited,” two as “proficient” and one was at the “mastery” level in English.