Although bilingual education has been implemented in classrooms for 25 years in the United States, not everyone understands how it works. People have questions regarding the use of the home language in teaching students: How can they experience success with instruction in English when they spend so much time learning in Spanish? Won't they fall behind in their academic studies? These results are hard to witness directly.

Benefits Received

When taught only in English, students may experience frustration at not being able to communicate even their most basic needs to their teachers. At the same time, they are unable to show how smart and ready to learn they are. Teachers only see that they are unable to complete work at their grade level. In contrast to this, students in bilingual classes feel comfortable, among familiar surroundings, as they begin to tackle the unfamiliar, the English language. Also, during this early stage of development, students must experience success and learn about what they can do well. Teachers in bilingual classrooms recognize that students know one language and are in the process of learning English. Finally, students continue learning in the home language while they develop their English language skills. This permits continued communication with parents and grandparents who may not know English. These are very good reasons to enroll your non­English proficient child in a bilingual program, but there are several more important reasons revealed through recent research results.

Research Results

During the past twenty years, many research studies have been done on the effects of bilingual education. Some research studies have compared it to programs that use more English. David Ramírez and others studied students participating in bilingual programs that use more English and compared student achievement with that of students in late­exit bilingual education programs (stayed 5­7 years). They found that in late­exit bilingual programs:

Students did not fall behind in learning content area subjects. After four or five years, they were making rapid gains, getting closer to the achievement levels of students whose first language was English.

They learned English well. The greatest gains made by students were in mathematics, English language skills, and English reading.

Parents of these students were able to provide them with homework assistance (since it was in the home language)

These academic goals were met because the home language creates a linguistic base. This language base serves as a stepping stone to learning English in an almost automatic way. Much of what is learned in the home language transfers automatically to the second language (English). Researchers, like James Cummins, who has conducted research in this area, have concluded that success in learning a second language depends on a student's home language level of development. This explains how it is possible for someone having high levels of Spanish language development to learn English not only faster, but with better results. It makes so much more sense to use such a positive and successful approach to learn English and academic subjects!

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Credits: ERIC Clearinghouse on Rural Education