Implementing and Maintaining a Dual Language Program: The Nuts and Bolts of a Pathway to Academic Excellence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dual Language: A Valuable and Achievable GoalIn recent years, the Dual Language (DL) or two-way bilingual program model has been implemented in an increasing number of U.S. schools (Padilla, Fan, Xu, & Silva, 2013; Shannon & Milian, 2002; Soltero, 2004; Torres-Guzman, Kleyn, Morales-Rodriguez, & Han, 2005). Although many of these schools serve populations that include high concentrations of English language learners (ELLs), others simply subscribe to the notion that this model provides an outstanding opportunity for some or all students to develop skills authentically in two languages and to improve their overall academic achievement by working cooperatively with others and by using both languages to learn academic content. In fact, DL programs have flourished for decades outside the United States, particularly in countries where two languages are widely or officially used, such as Canada and several of the European Union countries (Freeman, Freeman, & Mercuri, 2005; Lessow-Hurley, 2000). Dual language schools also prosper in Latin America, with prominent examples including the Torres campus of El Instituto Ovalle Monday in Mexico; El Colegio Bolivar in Cali, Colombia; and the Argentinian programs known as doble escolaridad (double schooling), in which instructors use both English and Spanish to teach all classes (Freeman et ah, 2005). In Asia, countries with many languages represented within their borders, such as India (Lessow-Hurley, 2000) and China (Kong, Hoare, & Chi, 2011), have also implemented DL programs.In the U.S. context, DL programs make it possible for native English speakers and speakers of other languages to develop bilingual literacy, learn from each other, and learn academic content in a cooperative, academically rigorous setting. Moreover, research suggests that this experience has a positive impact on growth and achievement for members of both groups (Esposito & Baker-Ward, 2013; Lindholm-Leary, 2001; Takahashi-Breines, 2002). Given this evidence of success and their growing popularity worldwide, many educators and administrators are expressing interest in implementing DL classes. Nevertheless, the task may seem daunting to those who lack knowledge of the nuts and bolts of operating such a program. Here, I seek to demystify the process, as well as to explain why launching and maintaining a DL program is a valuable and achievable goal for almost all districts and schools.Bilingual Education: The Models and the ResearchFor many years, the most prevalent form of bilingual education for ELLs in U.S. schools was the early exit or transitional model. Under this approach, once a student had become proficient in the second language (L2), he or she was placed in a monolingual class and received no further instruction in his or her first language (LI). However, evidence has been mounting that there are academic advantages not only to developing skills in two languages, but also to continuing bilingual/biliterate development (Corson, 1993; Cummins & Danesi, 1990; Magruder, Hayslip, Espinosa, & Matera, 2013; Rodriguez, 2015; Veliyeva, 2015). In addition, researchers have shown that LI and L2 literacy are strongly related in childhood L2 learners, as the development of literacy skills in both languages represents the mastery of common underlying principles (Atwill, Blanchard, Gorin, & Burstein, 2007; Cummins, 1984; Leikin, 2013; Verhoeven, 2007; Zhang, Anderson, Li, Dong, Wu, & Zhang, 2010). Thus, continuing to provide such learners with instruction in the LI not only supports proficiency in that language but also serves to promote conceptual development and academic understanding that can be transferred to facility in learning and using the L2 (Cummins & Schecter, 2003; Marian, Shook, & Schroeder, 2013; Martin-Beltran, 2009). In short, strategies taught in two or more languages serve to contribute positively not only to the acquisition of the L2, but to a students overall academic development as well. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".