Two-way immersion (TWI) programs are an increasingly popular educational model designed to foster academic achievement and develop high levels of bilingualism, biliteracy, and sociocultural competence (Howard et al., 2018). TWI has been shown to be highly effective at promoting English-language development and academic content learning, as well as…

Currently there is a gap in research literature that displays examples of how central office and building level administrators interact, collaborate, and make decisions concerning dual language immersion programs. This qualitative single case study attempts to answer the following questions concerning this problem of practice: What are the forms…

This research uses a descriptive quantitative statistical design to examine campus-level results from the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR). The focus is on describing the achievement disparities between campuses that implemented Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) programs and those implementing Dual Language (DL)…

Considerable research on the two-way Spanish immersion model of education highlights benefits such as biliteracy, high academic achievement in both languages of instruction, and sociocultural competence for students of various linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds. The desire to gain these 21st century skills has caused a proliferation of dual…

Unlike previous research on participation in mathematics classrooms that focuses on the teacher's role eliciting student talk, the purpose of this dissertation is to study the interactive process through which a teacher connected her reflection and practice, fostering transformations in the culture of participation in a third-grade Spanish…

China's rising economy has increased the popularity of learning the Chinese language. Chinese immersion programs have gained popularity in K-12 education, particularly for younger learners. However, research on the optimal instruction design for Chinese and English biliteracy development in one-way Chinese immersion programs is scarce. This…

Purpose: Situated within a complex social-political and developmental context marked by racialization and identity formation, this research aims to illuminate the nuanced ways Latinx youth navigate their bilingual experience amidst varying educational models and linguistic environments. The overarching goal of this dissertation is to investigate…

The goal of a dual language immersion program is for students to attain high academics in both the target and the partner language. Students, who enter the program in Kindergarten, are immersed in common core language arts standards with targeted literacy instruction in Spanish for the entire block. By the time students reach fifth grade, they are…

The United States has witnessed a rise in dual language immersion (DLI) programs in recent years, with instruction delivered both in English, the majority language spoken in the wider society, and in another language, often referred to as the partner or minority language. But while accountability mandates have focused on students' performance in…

Bilingual education in the United States basically involves English language learners (ELLs) in mainstream classes and students who are learning an additional language in a foreign language immersion (FLI) program. Although academic vocabulary instruction for ELLs has attracted increasing attention in the past two decades (e.g., McQuillan, 2019;…

The rapid growth of Mandarin Chinese and English dual-language (DL) programs and the differences between these two languages have fostered the need to investigate the early literacy performance of young students in a Mandarin/English DL program. This study used the interactive transfer framework (Chung et al., 2019) to understand the Mandarin and…

Presently, across the nation, immigration headlines grip the public's attention with negative messages, under the assumption that immigrants are stereotyped as either individuals with criminal intent or people who are unpatriotic to the United States. Under this thought, politicians scramble to meet the needs of their state by protecting their…

This study is framed in Bourdieu's theory of capital, which asserts that the choices we make are usually designed to help us become better off economically; that economic capital is, to some degree, exchangeable with other types of capital (e.g., social and cultural); and that other types of capital can be exchanged for economic capital. The…

There have been sweeping changes in foreign language education in the United States. As the world is experiencing unprecedented globalization, knowledge of a foreign language and familiarity with other cultures have become increasingly important. Public schools are now implementing dual immersion programs to better prepare students for the…

Language immersion programs are becoming more available as a form of school choice in both private and public education in the United States and beyond. While there is research on the benefits of immersion education regarding overall intelligence, there is still much skepticism as to why parents would place their child in an immersion program vs.…