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Schools are under increasing pressure to reclassify their English learner (EL) students to \"fluent English proficient\" status as quickly as possible. This article examines timing to reclassification among Latino ELs in four distinct linguistic instructional environments: English immersion, transitional bilingual, maintenance bilingual, and dual immersion. Using hazard analysis and 12 years of data from a large school district, the study investigates whether reclassification timing, patterns, or barriers differ by linguistic program. We find that Latino EL students enrolled in two-language programs are reclassified at a slower pace in elementary school but have higher overall reclassification, English proficiency, and academic threshold passage by the end of high school. We discuss the implications of these findings for accountability policies and educational opportunities in EL programs.

Adults are notoriously poor second-language (L2) learners. A context that enables successful L2 acquisition is language immersion. In this study, we investigated the effects of immersion learning for a group of university students studying abroad in Spain. Our interest was in the effect ofimmersion on the native language (LI), English. We tested the hypothesis that immersion benefits L2 learning as a result of attenuated influence of the L1. Participants were Englishspeaking learners of Spanish who were either immersed in Spanish while living in Spain or exposed to Spanish in the classroom only. Performance on both comprehension and production tasks showed that immersed learners outperformed their classroom counterparts with respect to L2 proficiency. However, the results also revealed that immersed learners had reduced LI access. The pattern of data is most consistent with the interpretation that the LI was inhibited while the learners were immersed.

Research on immersion teaching has consistently shown that immersion teachers tend to focus on subject matter content at the expense of language teaching. The response to that research has often entailed suggestions for teachers on how better to integrate language and content in their instruction. However, missing from the discussion are rich descriptions of the actual experiences that immersion teachers have as they attempt to balance language and content in their teaching. This phenomenological study aims to address this gap by exploring teachers' lived experience with content and language integration. In this article, authors report on findings suggesting that immersion teachers' experience with balancing language and content is a multifaceted struggle involving issues related to teacher identity, stakeholder expectations, and understandings regarding the relationship between language and content. Implications for school-based support for immersion programs as well as calls for reform in immersion teacher preparation and professional development are shared.

To facilitate second language learning, it has become increasingly popular to use a second language as the medium of instruction for content subjects for majority language students. Although numerous research studies have shown the advantages of such kind of programs in North America and Europe, those investigating English as the Medium of Instruction (EMI) schools in Hong Kong yielded inconclusive results. This meta-analysis is the first attempt to synthesize the research evidence on EMI education in Hong Kong since 1970. Based on 24 studies, this meta-analysis shows that students in EMI secondary schools were more proficient in second language and performed better on measures of affective variables. Yet their learning in other content subjects suffered. The differences between the effectiveness of EMI education in Hong Kong and that of similar programs in other contexts will be discussed, thereby illuminating second language acquisition theories and bilingual education.

This comparative analysis of teacher-student interaction in two different instructional settings at the elementary-school level (18.3 hr in French immersion and 14.8 hr Japanese immersion) investigates the immediate effects of explicit correction, recasts, and prompts on learner uptake and repair. The results clearly show a predominant provision of recasts over prompts and explicit correction, regardless of instructional setting, but distinctively varied student uptake and repair patterns in relation to feedback type, with the largest proportion of repair resulting from prompts in French immersion and from recasts in Japanese immersion. Based on these findings and supported by an analysis of each instructional setting's overall communicative orientation, we introduce the counterbalance hypothesis, which states that instructional activities and interactional feedback that act as a counterbalance to a classroom's predominant communicative orientation are likely to prove more effective than instructional activities and interactional feedback that are congruent with its predominant communicative orientation.This research was supported by Standard Research Grants (410-98-0175 and 410-2002-0988) awarded to the first author from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by a Nihon University Individual Research Grant for 2005 awarded to the second author. A version of this study was presented at the Second Language Research Forum held at Columbia University in October 2005. We are especially grateful to the participating teachers and their students and also to Yingli Yang for her role as research assistant in aggregating the datasets. We thank Sue Gass, Alison Mackey, Iliana Panova, Leila Ranta, and two SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

The defining feature of immersion language learning is the omnipresent pressure to communicate in the second language (L2), even as incipient skills are being acquired. This study uses the focused essay technique to investigate ambivalence about communicating among adolescent French immersion students (12–14 years of age). Students described situations in which they were most willing to communicate (241 entries received) and situations in which they were least willing to communicate (179 entries received). Responses reveal complex interrelations among linguistic development, L2 self-development, and the nonlinguistic issues that typically face adolescents. Most frequently, students discussed communication with teachers and friends in a school context, but other entries described situations outside the classroom, with extended family or encounters with media. Perceived competence and error correction were identified as major issues. Students also described feeling excluded or mocked because of their status as immersion students, but at other times they used language to form a secret club to exclude or poke fun at other people. Although we found substantial similarities between situations in which students are most or least willing to communicate, they can be differentiated by subtle changes in context that affect the authenticity of communication and needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

The authors of this chapter review empirical studies that have been conducted in bilingual education to propose a future research agenda that incorporates the most recent evidence on the effectiveness of bilingual programs, advances in neuroscience, and the body of evidence of the benefits of being bilingual and biliterate. They first describe the historical and sociopolitical precedent of how bilingual education came to play a determinant role in U.S. education. Next, they summarize reviews that have been conducted examining the effects of bilingual education on the academic performance of English learners from 1985 until 2003. They then review the research on bilingual education since 2003. Although the majority of studies reviewed focused on reading, the authors aho found studies that compared the effects of bilingual programs on other academic outcomes such as writing, science, and mathematics, inside and outside the United States. In addition, they address the benefits of bilingualism on cognition and discuss the research on cross-linguistic transfer to help the reader better understand the transfer of skills between the native language and the second language within the context of bilingual programs. They end the chapter with recommendations for future research.

This article reviews experimental studies comparing bilingual and English-only reading programs for English language learners. The review method is best-evidence synthesis, which uses a systematic literature search, quantification of outcomes as effect sizes, and extensive discussion of individual studies that meet inclusion standards. A total of 17 studies met the inclusion standards. Among 13 studies focusing on elementary reading for Spanish-dominant students, 9 favored bilingual approaches on English reading measures, and 4 found no differences, for a median effect size of +0.45. Weighted by sample size, an effect size of +0.33 was computed, which is significantly different from zero (p (.05). One of two studies of heritage languages (French and Choctaw) and two secondary studies favored bilingual approaches. The review concludes that although the number of high-quality studies is small, existing evidence favors bilingual approaches, especially paired bilingual strategies that teach reading in the native language and English at different times each day. However, further research using longitudinal, randomized designs is needed to determine how best to ensure reading success for all English language learners. (DIPF/Orig.).

Four teachers and their eight classes of 179 fifth-grade (10–11-year-old) students participated in this quasi-experimental classroom study, which investigated the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) and corrective feedback on immersion students' ability to accurately assign grammatical gender in French. The FFI treatment, designed to draw attention to selected noun endings that reliably predict grammatical gender and to provide opportunities for practice in associating these endings with gender attribution, was implemented in the context of regular subject-matter instruction by three of the four teachers, each with two classes, for approximately 9 hours during a 5-week period, while the fourth teacher taught the same subject matter without FFI to two comparison classes. Additionally, each of the three FFI teachers implemented a different feedback treatment: recasts, prompts, or no feedback. Analyses of pretest, immediate-posttest, and delayed-posttest results showed a significant increase in the ability of students exposed to FFI to correctly assign grammatical gender. Results of the written tasks in particular, and to a lesser degree the oral tasks, revealed that FFI is more effective when combined with prompts than with recasts or no feedback, as a means of enabling L2 learners to acquire rule-based representations of grammatical gender and to proceduralize their knowledge of these emerging forms.This study was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (nos. 410-98-0175 and 410-2002-0988). Parts of this study were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in Salt Lake City on April 7, 2002; the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Toronto on May 26, 2002; and at the Congress of the International Association for Applied Linguistics in Singapore on December 12, 2002. I am grateful to the participating teachers and their students, to Lucy Fazio for her role as research associate in the data collection, to José Correa for his assistance with the statistical analyses, and to the following research assistants for contributions to various phases of this research: Susan Ballinger, Kristina Eisenhower, Andréanne Gagné, Sophie Beaudoin, Laura-Annie Bouffard, France Bourassa, Sophie Bourgeois, Elisa David, Mélanie Mathieu, Sophie Prince, Andrea Sterzuk, and David Syncox. I gratefully acknowledge Leila Ranta, Iliana Panova, and four anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Simply put, children with poor English skills are less likely to succeed in school and beyond. What s the best way to teach English to young children who aren't native English speakers? In this article, Lisa Barrow and Lisa Markman-Pithers examine the state of English learner education in the United States and review the evidence behind different teaching methods. Models for teaching English learner children are often characterized as either English immersion (instruction only in English) or bilingual education (instruction occurs both in English and in the students' native language), although each type includes several broad categories. Which form of instruction is most effective is a challenging question to answer, even with the most rigorous research strategies. This uncertainty stems in part from the fact that, in a debate with political overtones, researchers and policymakers don't share a consensus on the ultimate goal of education for English learners. Is it to help English learner students become truly bilingual or to help them become proficient in the English language as quickly as possible? On the whole, Barrow and Markman-Pithers write, it's still hard to reach firm conclusions regarding the overall effectiveness of different forms of instruction for English learners. Although some evidence tilts toward bilingual education, recent experiments suggest that English learners achieve about the same English proficiency whether they're placed in bilingual or English immersion programs. But beyond learning English, bilingual programs may confer other advantages—for example, students in bilingual classes do better in their native languages. And because low-quality classroom instruction is associated with poorer outcomes no matter which method of instruction is used, the authors say that in many contexts, improving classroom quality may be the best way to help young English learners succeed.