Multilingual learners (MLs) are the country's fastest-growing student population: One in five students speak a language other than English at home, and 10 percent of the student population across the country is identified for language development services in school. Despite these students' growing presence nationwide, relatively few best practices…

This paper reports on a writing programme I started at Bronx Community College to improve academic success among recently immigrated Spanish-speaking students by linking ESL courses to Spanish academic literacy courses within the framework of a learning community. My reflection begins by articulating the pedagogical rationale for looking beyond…

This report summarizes Austin Independent School District's bilingual and English as a second language programs implemented during 2018-2019. Programs are summarized, as well as student demographic characteristics and the number of students served.

In the United States, English is not the official language but the dominant one. But for many students, the dominance of English instruction has come at the expense of losing their first language. For much of our history of schooling in the United States, students have been forced to leave their heritage or home languages at the door when they…

The potential of TWI to close the achievement gap for English language learners and to provide both native English speakers and native partner-language speakers with access to a high-quality education with positive academic, language, and sociocultural outcomes is clear. In this article, I argue that the realization of this potential for TWI…

Educational policies for English language learners (ELLs) tend to focus on English language acquisition. In this chapter, the authors argue that educators need to give more attention to the development of bilingualism and biliteracy to draw upon the tremendous intellectual, linguistic, and cultural resources that bilingual children bring to the…

This paper is an exploratory study of the childhood academic language environments (CALEs) of bilingual Japanese expatriate students. Student (n=28) and parent (n=67) surveys were adapted from the Life History Calendar (Caspi et al. 1996) to gather retrospective CALE data at a Japanese-English bilingual high school. Principal Components Analysis…

This paper provides a critical analysis of the National Bilingual Programme in Colombia. It considers how and why it aims to extend the teaching of "a" foreign language in Primary and Secondary school in 1994, to the teaching of English to an internationally recognized standard in all sectors of education by 2019, while at the same time…

Guidelines are presented for conducting a workshop on the process of describing and documenting the implementation of bilingual programs. The workshop is part of the Bilingual Evaluation Technical Assistance project. After examining how to organize the workshop, the following aids are presented: a preworkshop preparation checklist; a sample room…

A handbook for participants of a workshop on the process of describing and documenting the implementation of bilingual programs is presented. The workshop is part of the Bilingual Technical Assistance project. Workshop objectives are to: generate implementation questions appropriate for a given bilingual program; apply a strategy for describing…

Project PIAGET (Promoting Intellectual Adaptation Given Experiential Transforming) is a federally-funded bilingual early childhood and parent program serving limited-English-speaking bilingual children aged 2-8 years and their parents. The project is designed to promote English language and conceptual growth among young children and influence…

A handbook for participants of a workshop on bilingual program evaluation is presented as part of the Bilingual Evaluation Technical Assistance project. Workshop objectives are as follows: make a schedule for evaluation management tasks; create a staffing plan; prepare a budget appropriate for the particular bilingual evaluation; develop a plan…

The Sunflower/Girasol program is a Spanish/English bilingual science discovery program for Hispanic children in grades 2-6, designed to improve science instruction and educational opportunity for this group. The report describes the program's proposed activities and products, progress to date, and results of an evaluation of the first two units of…

A three-year, federally-funded program to train bilingual adult literacy and English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teachers to serve immigrants and refugees in the Boston (Massachusetts) area is reported and evaluated. A significant feature of the project was that it trained non-native-English-speaking community members to teach literacy skills and…

This report presents an evaluation of the Bilingual Readiness for Achieving through Valued Opportunities (Project BRAVO), an Elementary and Secondary Education Act Title VII-funded project in its first year of operation at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn (New York) and Louis D. Brandeis High School in Manhattan (New York). Participating…