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Washington County School district growing interest in dual immersion
https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2015/03/24/hsr-dual-immersion-language-council-invites-parents-to-informational-meeting/#.WJLICvkrLIU

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Dual-language immersion programs growing in popularity

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Dual-language immersion programs growing in popularity

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Evelyn Porras

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/08/local/la-me-bilingual-20110508

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Kristen Hutchison
http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr047.shtml

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Five Reasons to Start Bilingual Education Early 

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Five Reasons to Start Bilingual Education Early 

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Kristen Hutchison
http://www.theedadvocate.org/5-reasons-early-bilingual-education-is-important/

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Kyla Cox

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While bilingual education may seem like an easy topic for a person to pick a side and stick with, the reality is that it is a much more complicated issue than most realize. What is considered a pro by one person may be considered a con by another. Different people in different parts of the country have different language needs.

Since the pros and cons of bilingual education vary greatly from person to person, it is important to take an objective look at the pros and cons of this issue. The time has come for a fair assessment of the advantages and disadvantages. Let's take a more in depth look at the bilingual education debate.

List of Pros of Bilingual Education

1. One Day, It Will Be A Necessary Skill
As the world's minority language speaking populations continue to rise, children who are taught to speak multiple languages will become a hot commodity on the job market. In certain states and communities, the Spanish speaking population often outnumbers the English speaking population.

The Chinese population is also rising steadily, as well as those who speak Hindi languages. The children who are prepared to adapt to this rapidly changing world will be much better equipped to face the problems of the future, as opposed to those who only speak one language.

Best of all, a young child's mind is much more open to learning new concepts than their adult counterparts. Language experts concur that the peak time for a person to learn a new language is during their younger years. Increased language flexibility is a wonderful skill to be able to put on a resume and will open up a far larger job market for those who are educated bilingually.

2. Learning A Second Language Makes It Easier To Learn A Third
Once a person has opened their mind enough to take in a second language, it becomes even easier for them to learn a third and a fourth. Becoming bilingual increases a person's ability to focus on learning new tasks and also triggers increased concentration. Multitasking also becomes much simpler for those who are bilingual.

The area of the brain that is responsible for learning new materials and encouraging spatial growth is further stimulated with bilingual education. Studies show that bilingual education leads to increased brain growth and an increase in the person's ability to handle multiple tasks at once.

The world is shrinking every day at an astonishing rate. Children who are able to communicate fluently with a variety of cultures and peoples are the ones who will rise to the top in a world that is becoming more far more global that anyone could have anticipated.

3. There Are Multiple Personality Benefits
There a plethora of personality benefits to be gained by children who are able to experience a bilingual education. Bilingual education is a great way to enhance your child's overall working memory. Studies have shown that children who show the ability to handle learning a second language also increase their ability to process new sounds, especially those who use separate languages on a regular basis.

A child who receives a bilingual education is also far less likely to experience a wide range of personal disorders, including anxiety. They are also typically much less lonely than their single language speaking counterparts. Accomplishing a task of this nature is also a great boost to their self-esteem.

Their overall aggression level is also reduced and their ability to reason logically experiences a significant boost. They externalize their anger at a much less frequent rate and less likely to get into arguments with their peers.

4. Leads To A More Well Rounded Child
While skeptics believe that bilingual education will only serve to confuse a young student, studies prove that learning a second language enhances the mind and provides the student with a much brighter future, making it easier for them to understand and relate to other cultures throughout the world.

A child who is able to grasp a second or third language opens up a much larger world to themselves and is much more likely to be cultured and worldly. They are able to study abroad and gain more from the experience than those who study abroad without being able to speak the predominant language of the country.

They will have a decided advantage over children who do not speak more than one language. Learning a second language provides a valuable gateway to positive interactions with other races, which leads to personal growth and more rapid development of other important social skills.

List of Cons of Bilingual Education

1. Bilingual Education Is Quite Costly
Schools all across the country are struggling to keep their foreign language programs funded as is. Running a dominant language program is far cheaper than attempting to educate a minority language student. Often, if a student does not have a strong understanding of the language they are being taught, all of the money spent on establishing the program is a complete waste.

Spending money on bilingual education programs takes valuable funding away from programs that schools are already forced to cut back on. Physical education and music related programs are consistently falling by the wayside, in favor of foreign language programs that are not proven to be successful. For this reason, many schools have elected to stick with their current dominant language programs.

2. Foreign Language Students Do Not Assimilate As Easily
One of the most common criticisms of bilingual education is that it provides foreign language students with an opportunity to avoid complete and total assimilation into the culture where they currently live. In order to fully adapt to the current culture of the country where a person resides, a person needs to make certain sacrifices.

Chief among these sacrifices is their dominant language and culture. When bilingual education is offered, it simply serves to widen the cultural gap, as opposed to bridging it. It also becomes more difficult for the student to experience success in other school subjects, such as math or science.

Those who speak a minority language should be able to learn English, while also holding onto their native tongue and their own cultural traditions. Learning a second language should never be an either/or proposition.

3. Reduces Focus On A Career
When a child is made to spend a great deal of time learning a second language, this can hinder their ability to develop the skills that they need in other areas. Specializing in one particular area is considered to stunt the child's overall development and can actually lead to a lack of well-rounded learning.

Teaching a child to be bilingual is an extremely time consuming pursuit and one that can cause a great deal of frustration for both the teacher and the student alike. If a child becomes frustrated with learning, this attitude can spill over into how they relate to other subjects.

Some children respond well to learning a second language, while others do not. For this reason, it is crucial that you are able to read the warning signs in the child you are trying to teach, so that you do not burn them out on learning altogether and adversely affect their chances of reaching their true potential and focusing on the career that they desire.

4. Lack Of Qualified Teachers
One of the main issues that continues to arise in the world of bilingual education is the severe lack of qualified teachers who are able to handle the subject. Quality bilingual education requires a firm, patient, expert teacher who has the time on their hands to take care of all the issues that arise.

Unfortunately, these teachers are in very short supply. Many of them are already very busy teaching their normal subjects and do not have the time necessary to add teaching a second language to their already busy schedule.

At a point in time when so many teachers' capabilities are being stretched to the limit and schools are struggling to fill their staffs with qualified educators, the idea of taking talented teachers and assigning them to teach a second language is not something that is universally supported.

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List of Pros and Cons of Bilingual Education

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While bilingual education may seem like an easy topic for a person to pick a side and stick with, the reality is that it is a much more complicated issue than most realize. What is considered a pro...

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Kyla Cox

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Part of our ongoing series exploring how the U.S. can educate the nearly 5 million students who are learning English.
Brains, brains, brains. One thing we've learned at NPR Ed is that people are fascinated by brain research. And yet it can be hard to point to places where our education system is really making use of the latest neuroscience findings.

But there is one happy nexus where research is meeting practice: bilingual education. "In the last 20 years or so, there's been a virtual explosion of research on bilingualism," says Judith Kroll, a professor at the University of California, Riverside.

Again and again, researchers have found, "bilingualism is an experience that shapes our brain for a lifetime," in the words of Gigi Luk, an associate professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.

At the same time, one of the hottest trends in public schooling is what's often called dual-language or two-way immersion programs.

Traditional programs for English-language learners, or ELLs, focus on assimilating students into English as quickly as possible. Dual-language classrooms, by contrast, provide instruction across subjects to both English natives and English learners, in both English and in a target language.

The goal is functional bilingualism and biliteracy for all students by middle school.

New York City, North Carolina, Delaware, Utah, Oregon and Washington state are among the places expanding dual-language classrooms.

The trend flies in the face of some of the culture wars of two decades ago, when advocates insisted on "English first" education. Most famously, California passed Proposition 227 in 1998. It was intended to sharply reduce the amount of time that English-language learners spent in bilingual settings.

Proposition 58, passed by California voters on Nov. 8, largely reversed that decision, paving the way for a huge expansion of bilingual education in the state that has the largest population of English-language learners.

Some of the insistence on English-first was founded in research produced decades ago, in which bilingual students underperformed monolingual English speakers and had lower IQ scores.

Today's scholars, like Ellen Bialystok at York University in Toronto, now say that research was "deeply flawed."

"Earlier research looked at socially disadvantaged groups," agrees Antonella Sorace at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. "This has been completely contradicted by recent research" that compares more similar groups to each other.

So what does recent research say about the potential benefits of bilingual education? NPR Ed called up seven researchers in three countries - Sorace, Bialystok, Luk, Kroll, Jennifer Steele, and the team of Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier - to find out.
Attention
It turns out that, in many ways, the real trick to speaking two languages consists in managing not to speak one of those languages at a given moment - which is fundamentally a feat of paying attention.

Saying "Goodbye" to mom and then " Guten tag" to your teacher, or managing to ask for a crayola roja instead of a red crayon, requires skills called "inhibition" and "task switching." These skills are subsets of an ability called executive function.

People who speak two languages often outperform monolinguals on general measures of executive function. "[Bilinguals] can pay focused attention without being distracted and also improve in the ability to switch from one task to another," says Sorace.

Do these same advantages accrue to a child who begins learning a second language in kindergarten instead of as a baby? We don't yet know. Patterns of language learning and language use are complex. But Gigi Luk at Harvard cites at least one brain-imaging study on adolescents that shows similar changes in brain structure when compared with those who are bilingual from birth, even when they didn't begin practicing a second language in earnest before late childhood.
Empathy
Young children being raised bilingual have to follow social cues to figure out which language to use with which person and in what setting. As a result, says Sorace, bilingual children as young as age 3 have demonstrated a head start on tests of perspective-taking and theory of mind - both of which are fundamental social and emotional skills.
Reading (English)
About 10 percent of students in the Portland, Ore., public schools are assigned by lottery to dual-language classrooms that offer instruction in Spanish, Japanese or Mandarin, alongside English.

Jennifer Steele at American University conducted a four-year, randomized trial and found that these dual-language students outperformed their peers in English-reading skills by a full school year's worth of learning by the end of middle school.

Such a large effect in a study this size is unusual, and Steele is currently conducting a flurry of follow-up studies to tease out the causality: Is this about a special program that attracted families who were more engaged? Or about the dual-language instruction itself?

"If it's just about moving the kids around," Steele says, "that's not as exciting as if it's a way of teaching that makes you smarter."

Steele suspects the latter. Because the effects are found in reading, not in math or science where there were few differences, she suggests that learning two languages makes students more aware of how language works in general, aka "metalinguistic awareness."

The research of Gigi Luk at Harvard offers a slightly different explanation. She has recently done a small study looking at a group of 100 fourth-graders in Massachusetts who had similar reading scores on a standard test, but very different language experiences.

Some were foreign-language dominant and others were English natives. Here's what's interesting. The students who were dominant in a foreign language weren't yet comfortably bilingual; they were just starting to learn English. Therefore, by definition, they had much weaker English vocabularies than the native speakers.

Yet they were just as good at decoding a text.

"This is very surprising," Luk says. "You would expect the reading comprehension performance to mirror vocabulary - it's a cornerstone of comprehension."

How did the foreign-language dominant speakers manage this feat? Well, Luk found, they also scored higher on tests of executive functioning. So, even though they didn't have huge mental dictionaries to draw on, they may have been great puzzle-solvers, taking into account higher-level concepts such as whether a single sentence made sense within an overall story line.

They got to the same results as the monolinguals, by a different path.
School performance and engagement.
Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier, a husband and wife team of professors emeritus at George Mason University in Virginia, have spent the past 30 years collecting evidence on the benefits of bilingual education.

"Wayne came to our research with skepticism, thinking students ought to get instruction all day in English," says Virginia Collier. "Eight million student records later, we're convinced," Wayne Thomas chimes in.

In studies covering six states and 37 districts, they have found that, compared with students in English-only classrooms or in one-way immersion, dual-language students have somewhat higher test scores and also seem to be happier in school. Attendance is better, behavioral problems fewer, parent involvement higher.
Diversity and integration.
American public school classrooms as a whole are becoming more segregated by race and class. Dual-language programs can be an exception. Because they are composed of native English speakers deliberately placed together with recent immigrants, they tend to be more ethnically and socioeconomically balanced. And there is some evidence that this helps kids of all backgrounds gain comfort with diversity and different cultures.

Several of the researchers I talked with also pointed out that, in bilingual education, non-English-dominant students and their families tend to feel that their home language is heard and valued, compared with a classroom where the home language is left at the door in favor of English.

This can improve students' sense of belonging and increase parent involvement in their children's education, including behaviors like reading to children.

"Many parents fear their language is an obstacle, a problem, and if they abandon it their child will integrate better," says Antonella Sorace of the University of Edinburgh. "We tell them they're not doing their child a favor by giving up their language."
Protection against cognitive decline and dementia.
File this away as a very, very long-range payoff. Researchers have found that actively using two languages seems to have a protective effect against age-related dementia - perhaps relating to the changes in brain structure we talked about earlier.

Specifically, among patients with Alzheimer's in a Canadian study, a group of bilingual adults performed on par with a group of monolingual adults in terms of cognitive tests and daily functioning. But when researchers looked at the two groups' brains, they found evidence of brain atrophy that was five to seven years more advanced in the bilingual group. In other words, the adults who spoke two languages were carrying on longer at a higher level despite greater degrees of damage.
The coda, and a caution
One theme that was striking in speaking to all these researchers was just how strongly they advocated for dual-language classrooms.

Thomas and Collier have advised many school systems on how to expand their dual-language programs, and Sorace runs " Bilingualism Matters," an international network of researchers who promote bilingual education projects.

This type of advocacy among scientists is unusual; even more so because the "bilingual advantage hypothesis" is being challenged once again. A review of studies published last year found that cognitive advantages failed to appear in 83 percent of published studies, though in a separate meta-analysis, the sum of effects was still significantly positive.

One potential explanation offered by the researchers I spoke with is that advantages that are measurable in the very young and very old tend to fade when testing young adults at the peak of their cognitive powers.

And, they countered that no negative effects of bilingual education have been found. So, they argue that even if the advantages are small, they are still worth it.

Not to mention one obvious, outstanding fact underlined by many of these researchers: "Bilingual children can speak two languages! That's amazing," says Bialystok.

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6 Potential Brain Benefits Of Bilingual Education

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Part of our ongoing series exploring how the U.S. can educate the nearly 5 million students who are learning English. Brains, brains, brains. One thing we've learned at NPR Ed is that people are fascinated by brain research. And yet it can be hard to point to places where our education system is really making use of the latest neuroscience findings.

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This Ted Talk demonstrates the benefits of a being bilingual. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMmOLN5zBLY

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This Ted Talk demonstrates the benefits of a being bilingual. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMmOLN5zBLY

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The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 was the first act by Congress acknowledging the need for bilingual education in schools. 

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The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 was the first act by Congress acknowledging the need for bilingual education in schools. 