The Houston Independent School District offers two primary bilingual programs for Spanish-speaking English-language learners (ELLs). In both programs, students may transition into a pre-exit phase of bilingual education so long as they meet certain performance criteria. In this Pre-Exit phase, predominantly English-language instruction is used in…

Little is known about how engaging in the learning-oriented leadership model (Drago-Severson, 2004b, 2009, 2012a) can support educators to address the adaptive challenges they encounter in their day-to-day work teaching English learners. My qualitative study examined how 11 educators whose school leaders implement the learning-oriented leadership…

In 2013, the Austin Independent School District began administering a voluntary online exit survey to all professional and administrative employees leaving the district. Responses and respondent characteristics are described for 2014. This is a research brief of a full report (published separately). [For the full report, see ED626497.]

This report provides a description of Austin Independent School District (AISD) English language learner (ELL) student enrollment in the district during school year 2011-2012, examines ELL progress in English proficiency and academic content areas, and evaluates the dual language program in its first year of district wide implementation. A…

Scholars who work with Latino/as in the USA have long been calling for a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneity of the US-based Latino population. Two-way Immersion (TWI) bilingual education programmes are an interesting context in which to examine the Latino parent communities in the USA. Overall, the language enrichment nature of TWI…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to explore and identify issues related to training teachers to use a bilingual writing rubric designed to examine the biliterate writing of emerging bilingual students who are participating in a biliteracy model. Findings indicate the need to provide clarifications on the rubric rating criteria and the…

This paper examines bilingual education policies and practices in China and the interconnection and influences of the west in the new developments in bilingual education in this country. It focuses on bilingual education in Tibetan areas considering the sociopolitical context, the Tibetan tradition, and the current developments and new knowledge…

The development of English and Spanish reading and oral language skills from kindergarten to third grade was examined with a sample of 502 Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) enrolled in three instructional programs. The students in the transitional bilingual and dual-language programs had significantly higher scores than the…

This article provides a deeper understanding of how young bilinguals constructed meaning with expository texts in an inquiry-based setting over an academic year. An examination of classroom transcripts and analysis revealed how "Viewing" became the most frequently used literacy practice and a cultural tool in the construction of meaning…

If children do not learn how to read in the first few years of primary school, they will struggle to complete the cycle, and are at greater risk of dropping out. It is therefore crucial to identify and test interventions that have the potential of making a large impact, can be implemented quickly, and are affordable to be taken to scale. This is…

This paper investigates the differences in academic achievement trajectories from elementary through middle school among English Learner students in four different instructional programs: English Immersion, Transitional Bilingual, Developmental Bilingual, and Dual Immersion programs. Comparing students with the same parental preferences but who…

There are many types of programs for Spanish speaking students in the US, with varying methods and goals. Some preliminary work suggests that bilingual classrooms may differ widely in instruction, even under the same program labels. However, there are few studies which have compared the extent to which various bilingual program models differ in…

In 2009, the then State Minister for Education in New South Wales, Verity Firth, announced a plan to introduce bilingual education in four primary schools across the state for the National Asian Languages and Studies in School Program (NALSSP) priority languages: Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Korean. This paper reports on one aspect of a…

The Texas Education Code requires school districts to provide every language minority student with the opportunity to participate in either a bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) program. This report summarizes the performance of students who participated in the district's Dual Language Bilingual Program. Included in the report are…

Gabriela Montserrat (pseudonym) is a Mexican-American child classified by her school district as an "emerging bilingual" and is the focus of this qualitative case study that took place at a public elementary school located in a suburban community in the southwestern US in Mrs Pérez's (pseudonym) second-grade classroom. The student's use…