This case study focuses on one primarily Latino public primary school in New Jersey that waived the state's bilingual education requirement and implemented a curricular alternative, comprised of bilingual and monolingual English classrooms. A corpus was generated from one-to-one interviews (N = 8) with administrators and teachers, as well as…

Emergent bilinguals' engagement and participation with learning is closely connected to the identities they are able to construct in this learning. In this paper, I present a model for understanding how young emergent bilinguals begin to construct identities with language and learning across school-based activities. Drawing upon Holland,…

Previous research examining the reading achievement of immigrant children has often grouped English learners into one broad category, referred to as ELs, thereby creating an "either-or" dichotomy regarding whether or not these students need school language supports. The present study examined the theoretical contention regarding the…

Texas requires a school district to offer bilingual education when its enrollment of limited English proficient (LEP) students in a particular elementary grade and language is twenty or higher. Using school panel data, we find a significant increase in the probability that a district offers bilingual education above this 20-student cutoff. Using…

This article is a summary of a longer report, completed under the direction of the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society and the doctoral program in Urban Education at the Graduate Center in the City University of New York (CUNY) with funding provided by the New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (NYSIEB). It…

Improving the education of a growing sector of the school population--English language learners (ELLs)--is a pressing unmet need in the nation's current public education system (Gándara 1994; Genesee et al. 2006; Hood 2003). Another urgent educational need is to prepare students to live and work in an increasingly globally connected world.…

This study examines the self-esteem, acculturation, and ethnic identity of 150 Latino adolescents enrolled in either a bilingual or traditional education program. Bilingual education programs were established to ensure that academic failure was not the product of limited English proficiency. Grade point average (GPA), acculturation, and ethnic…

The purpose of this study was to predict the third grade English reading TAKS scores while considering the same students' native language, Spanish, reading level as assessed by a state-approved reading assessment, the Evaluacion del desarrollo de la lectura (EDL), from the end of the second grade year. In addition, this study was been designed to…

Staff development is too often inadequate or overlooked in bilingual education. Rather, bilingual educators are forced to seek outside resources and strategies because of inconsistencies in school district bilingual programs. These authors offer a "crash" course for other teachers who may be looking for solid information about bilingual…

As the ranks of English language learners swell in the United States, the number of students with interrupted formal education (SIFE) is on the rise. In 2004-05, New York City schools estimated that 10 percent of their English language learners were students with interrupted schooling. According to the New York State Department of Education,…

This practitioner issue brief outlines successful strategies and recommendations for state-level policymakers, administrators, schools, and districts that are based on a 5-year evaluation study on the learning environment for ELLs in the state of California. This brief offers four critical building blocks that should be in place to effectively…

Using various approaches to identify English language learners, several Pacific Region jurisdictions are developing English language proficiency standards and assessments aligned with those standards. Others are working on content standards, including language arts, and have expressed interest in developing English language proficiency standards…

This report summarizes Austin Independent School District's (AISD's) 2005-2006 bilingual and English as a second language programs.