What Two-way Bilingual Programmes Reveal About the Controversy Surrounding Race and Intelligence

Abstract

One of the most promising ways of developing bilingual skills of students in the United States is through 'two-way immersion' programmes, where 50% of the students are native English speakers and 50% speakers of a minority language and where half the teaching is done by professional teachers who use either English only or the minority language only. In 'two-way immersion' programmes, little attention has been paid to the experiences of African-American students, who, in conventional programmes, persistently perform poorly relative to English native white children, especially on tests of English achievement or on intelligence tests. If the poor performance of African-American youngsters is due to genetically determined deficits, as some specialists argue, we would expectthem to perform poorly on achievement tests in both languages. The present study focuses on African-American students' maths and reading achievement in a Spanish-English two-way immersion programme, from Grade 1 to Grade 4. The results show that the African-American children perform significantly lower than majority white students on English achievement tests at all grades. However, there is no significant difference between the two ethnic groups in Spanish achievement in the early grades. The results of this study point to the primary role of social/environmental factors in the comparatively lower scores of African-American children on standardised English achievement tests.