A study assessed and compared the effectiveness of two distinct approaches of bilingual education used within a single school district in El Paso (Texas). The program designs, one a traditional transitional bilingual and the other a bilingual immersion, were implemented under similar conditions of resources, school year length, class size, and…

A structured immersion program, coupled with an effective curriculum and empirically validated teaching procedure, was offered to elementary Asian students entering a California school. This approach appeared to have significantly better results, and its effects were maintained for up to two years after completion. (LMO)

Despite claims that structured immersion programs for language minority students cannot work for low-income students, two immersion projects with low-income Hispanic and Asian children worked; their effects appeared to endure even after students entered the mainstream. (BJV)