Dual-Language Education for English Language Learners

Abstract

0 Dual-language education (DLE) provides instruction aimed at developing bilingual abilities. Contexts and languages vary widely, from Spanish/English programs in the United States, to a Hungarian/Slovak school in the Slovak Republic, to a Maori/English program in New Zealand (Christian & Genesee, 2001). These schools share a common goal: development of the Li of the students along with high levels of proficiency and literacy in an L2. An increasingly popular form of DLE is two-way immersion, in which students from two different language backgrounds are integrated for all or most of the instructional day. All students receive content instruction and literacy instruction in both languages, with the goals of developing bilingualism, strong academic abilities, and positive cross-cultural attitudes (Christian, 1996; LindholmLeary, 2001). There has been a surge in the popularity of these programs in the past 10 years, and they are currently receiving a great deal of attention. The incidence of two-way immersion remains highest in the United States, but programs are being implemented around the worldfor example, a Macedonian/Albanian program reported by Tankersley (2001). Gaps remain in the research base needed for guiding program design and implementation, however (Freeman, 1998; Tarone & Swain, 1995; Vald6s, 1997). For all dual-language approaches, questions arise related to schoolbased language instruction and the need to master content through, and literacy in, an L2 (August & Hakuta, 1997; Christian & Genesee, 2001). The acquisition of literacy competence as well as subject matter learning is a critical factor in academic success, and these processes need to be better understood when L2 learning is occurring at the same time (Crandall, 1992). Other important questions involve how to ensure language learning to high proficiency levels when the focus is primarily on content. Some critical research questions include