Dual Language - Historical Context of Two-Way Immersion

Historical Context of Two-Way Immersion

The initiation of dual immersion programs in the United States is characterized by the coalescence of local politicians and community members. Coral Way Elementary, an K-8 school in Dade County, Florida, is cited as the first two-way bilingual school, beginning in 1963 . The program was started by Cuban citizens, who were seeking refuge in Florida from the Castro regime, and believed that their children would eventually return to Cuban schools . The Ecole Bilingue, a French/English school in Massachusetts too was formed around the same time . In 1968, the passing of the Bilingual Education Act, served to address the reality that Limited English Proficient(LEP) students were in need of proper instructional support to achieve academic gains, and in turn provided federal funding for primary language instruction in local school districts . The Lau v. Nichols ruling of 1974 further affirmed a student’s right to educational opportunity via appropriate instructional services (Calderón, 2000). Schools were thus charged with the mission to implement programs suitable to the needs of their language minority students.

While the number of dual immersion programs remained relatively low throughout the mid-1980s, a greater attention to the need to provide challenging yet comprehensible (Calderón, 2000) instruction to English language learners (ELLs), in more recent years, triggered a substantial growth in the number of programs. In 2002, for example, the implementation of the English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement Act of the No Child Left Behind Act, subsequently made it requisite that schools with large numbers of language minority students receive instruction that facilitates their acquisition of English, to consequently perform well on standardized tests . There are presently three hundred and ninety-eight two-way immersion programs in thirty distinct states and the District of Columbia . The quantity of programs has increased significantly in the last decade, despite efforts made in states such as Arizona and California to eradicate bilingual education programs in favor of English-immersion, with the passing of Proposition 203 and Proposition 227, respectively. It is estimated ninety-four percent of the dual immersion programs are Spanish/English, with the remaining six percent either Chinese/English, Navajo/English, Japanese/English, and Korean/English programs (Bae, 2007).