This dissertation compares the relative effects of two contrasting approaches to bilingual instruction and of bilingual education as compared to traditional English monolingual education upon the dual language development and use of a group of first and second grade Italian dominant students. The sample of the study consisted of 106 Italian immigrant students attending public schools in Brooklyn, New York. There were three groups: (1) the fused language acquisition context group (FLAC), (2) the English monolingual group (EM), and (3) the separate language acquisition context group (SLAC). It was hypothesized that, upon completion of seven months of classroom instruction, the SLAC group would show more advanced syntactic and vocabulary development, linguistic maturity, and overall communicative ability, as well as greater linguistic independence and less language alternation in both English and Italian than the other two groups. Findings indicated that the SLAC group achieved significantly greater gains in linguistic maturity. All other findings were non significant except the degree of linguistic independence as found in favor of the EM group. The findings provide evidence in support of the separate language acquisition method in particular and of bilingual instruction in general as a viable means of educating the non-English dominant student. (Author/AM)