Academic achievement of students in dual language immersion

ABSTRACT

This article reports on a study that investigated achievement in math of third and fourth grade dual language immersion (DLI) students, building on research that has demonstrated the academic achievement of students who receive content instruction predominantly in the target language. Our study expands the scope and methodology of prior research by including one-way programs in three languages (Chinese, French and Spanish) and two-way Spanish-English programs; and by relying on propensity matching to mitigate possible effects of school and student differences. In our third grade study, we compared students’ math scores in relation to their English Language Arts (ELA) achievement to control for pre-existing differences between DLI and non-DLI students. DLI students who attained the same levels in ELA, and who received math instruction in a target language, performed at the same level as their non-DLI peers in third grade math tests given in English. For the fourth grade study, we compared DLI students to a propensity-matched non-DLI group. DLI students grew more in math than their counterparts not in DLI. The results from this natural experiment indicate that students in a DLI program that has been implemented state-wide were able to succeed academically in math.

KEYWORDS:

• Dual language immersion
• academic achievement
• content and language integrated learning
• bilingual education
• content-based instruction
• immersion education

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to acknowledge the assistance provided by the Utah Education Policy Center at the University of Utah, and the Utah State Board of Education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Johanna Watzinger-Tharp is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Utah. She earned her MA and PhD degrees at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on L2 methodology and teacher education, dual immersion, and language variation, and has been published in Foreign Language Annals, the Modern Language Journal and Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German. Her publications also include co-edited volumes and German language textbooks. In 2010, the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) awarded her the Anthony Papalia Award for Excellence in Teacher Education. She serves as the co-chair of Utah’s World Language Council, which produced the Utah Language Roadmap for the 21st Century that helped create Utah’s Dual Language Immersion Program.

Kristin Swenson is a Senior Level Research Consultant at Utah’s Department of Human Services, and earned her MS and PhD at the University of Utah. She specializes in quantitative analysis, focusing primarily on multivariate analyses, longitudinal analyses, and random and fixed effects models. Her areas of research in the field of cognitive psychology include implicit memory processes and reading comprehension and, in the field of education, scale development, dual language immersion, and relationships between chronic absenteeism and high school dropout. She has published in Death Studies and the Journal of Gerontology: Social Science and is currently conducting research related to issues of behavioral and mental health. As Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Utah, she teaches advanced quantitative methods at the doctoral level.

Zachary Mayne is a Research Associate in the Utah Education Policy Center at the University of Utah and a doctoral student in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Utah. His educational psychology research interests include cognitive development, explicit and implicit memory processes, and intelligence. His research in education includes test validity and reliability, school climate and educator effectiveness, and dual language immersion. He has expertise in analyzing experimental and observational data, using various quantitative methods such as psychometric analysis, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, structural equation modeling, and analysis of variance.

ORCiD

Johanna Watzinger-Tharp http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6300-1754

Notes

1 Immersion education is considered a type of bilingual education. In Canada, Europe, and South America, programs are typically referred to as bilingual; dual (language) immersion has taken hold in the US though the term is applied inconsistently. A recent report on immersion education in the US advocates for uniform use of “dual language immersion” to refer to all programs that provide instruction in two languages, and to distinguish between one-way and two-way (Boyle 2016, 97).

2 The terminology to classify immersion program types continues to evolve. For example, total or full immersion instructional models are now typically referred to as 90/10, and partial immersion has largely been replaced by 50/50. Some states use ‘dual language’ for two-way programs only, referring to one-way as ‘foreign language.’ Utah refers to both 50/50 one-way and two-way immersion programs as dual language immersion, or DLI.

3 In the context of their studies of language minority students, Collier and Thomas (2004) define one-way programs as those that serve students from one language group, often heritage speakers, whose linguistic backgrounds may vary widely. In the two-way programs they included in their study, native English-speaking and minority language populations form an integrated bilingual classroom.

4 Delaware’s World Language Expansion Initiative started four programs in 2012, with an annual investment of $1.9 million; currently, some 2300 students are enrolled in Mandarin Chinese and Spanish immersion programs. In 2013, the Georgia Department of Education awarded grants for DLI to six elementary schools (Georgia Department of Education 2013).

5 These assurances are accessible on the Utah DLI homepage: http://www.utahdli.org/assurances.html.

Additional information

Funding

Initial research for the study reported here was supported with funding from The Vice President for Research, University of Utah.