Bilingual Education Research Paper

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Yet while critics in the United States claim that bilingual education is a "failed experiment," most other modern nations consider it the norm and cannot imagine why Americans would prefer an education in only one language.

What about the history of bilingual education in the United States has led to the emotional controversy surrounding the teaching of students in two languages?

It concluded, "When socioeconomic status is controlled, bilingualism shows no negative effects on the overall linguistic, cognitive, or social development of children, and may even provide general advantages in these areas of mental functioning." In addition, "use of the child's native language does not impede the acquisition of English." A subsequent study also commissioned by the National Research Council on preventing reading difficulties in young children concurred: "If language minority children arrive at school with no proficiency in English but speaking a language for which there are instructional guides, learning materials, and locally available proficient teachers, they should be taught how to read in their native language." More recently, a synthesis study commissioned by the U. Department of Education and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development also concluded that it was generally preferable to teach Spanish-speaking students to read in Spanish where possible.

The Bush administration, however, refused to release it with its imprimatur in spite of two peer reviews that concurred with its findings.

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Bilingual Education Research Paper

We use cookies to offer you a better experience, personalize content, tailor advertising, provide social media features, and better understand the use of our services.These findings are important because they may explain results of short-term evaluation studies in which students in bilingual programs sometimes score lower than others in English-only programs when tested early on and only in English.It seems that students require more time to become competent in both English and the primary language.The federal government has also sponsored research syntheses. Keith Baker and Adriana de Kanter conducted a simple meta-analysis on twenty-eight studies of bilingual education that they considered sufficiently methodologically sound, and concluded that there was not enough evidence in favor of transitional bilingual education to mandate it as the favored approach for educating English learners.The study was cited widely for many years afterward, as bilingual education came under increasing attack during the Reagan administration.The Baker and de Kanter study itself, however, was widely criticized for being biased in the studies selected and methodologically weak in its simple "up or down vote" methods.Questions about their meta-analysis gave rise to a series of re-analyses by other researchers, most of which concluded that when strict methodological criteria were applied to the selection of the studies, such as only including studies that had well-defined control groups, bilingual programs tended to show better outcomes than English-only programs.Almost all evaluation of students at the end of elementary school and in middle and high school show that the educational outcomes of bilingually educated students, especially those in late-exit and two-way programs, were at least comparable to and usually higher than their comparison peers.There was no study of middle school or high school students that found that bilingually educated students were less successful than their comparison peers.In this study, great care was taken to observe actual instruction in the classrooms.But although the principal investigator, David Ramírez, argued that the trajectories of student achievement strongly favored late-exit ("maintenance") bilingual programs, he conceded that the four-year duration of the study was insufficient to draw definitive conclusions.