This brief report summarizes the development and psychometric properties of German reading fluency passages as compared to English reading fluency passages for immersion language learners. Results indicated that scores from German language reading fluency passages alone were (a) somewhat less reliable than scores from English publisher-developed…

This paper examines the construct of bilingual phonemic awareness in Irish-English bilinguals. Though traditionally viewed as a skill or ability which transfers across languages, recent accounts have considered whether phonemic awareness has a language-specific component. This study used a cross-sectional design to examine this question. A total…

This study examined the oral language skills of grade-two anglophone children enrolled in French Immersion and English-stream programs. The study had two objectives: (1) to compare performance between the groups on measures of receptive vocabulary, narrative comprehension, and narrative production (i.e., structure and language) in English; and (2)…

This study compares the English and French proficiencies of three groups of early French immersion participants at the Grade 6 level: Canadian-born English-speaking, Canadian-born multilingual, and immigrant multilingual students. In addition to English and French multi-skills tests, the participants completed a questionnaire designed to gather…

This study seeks to examine the success of voluntary immigrants in Grade 6 French immersion with a double comparison to Canadian-born (a) Anglophones and (b) multilingual students (children of voluntary immigrants). The findings, that show the immigrant students to outperform the other two groups in French and English, are explored through a…

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…

Language immersion programs are becoming more available as a form of school choice in both private and public education in the United States and beyond. While there is research on the benefits of immersion education regarding overall intelligence, there is still much skepticism as to why parents would place their child in an immersion program vs.…

This study examines the writing skills of students in grades 1 to 5 of an Italian-English two-way immersion program. Narrative writing samples were collected in both languages and scored for content, organization, grammar, mechanics, vocabulary, text length, and overall total score. The results show that writing skills improved as a function of…

The article discusses how instead of being parts of a concerted educational reform effort, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the development of charter schools are in fact contradictory initiatives. Basing itself on a theoretical framework that brings together issues inherent to outcome-based school reform and arguments supporting and criticizing…

Research has demonstrated that students in dual-language immersion programs perform as well as, or better than, their peers in core academic content areas by late elementary school. However, the extent to which immersion education fosters bilingualism has received less attention in the literature. Using data from a four-year efficacy study of…

Research has demonstrated that students in dual-language immersion programs perform as well as, or better than, their peers in core academic content areas by late elementary school. The extent to which immersion education fosters bilingualism, however, has received less attention in the literature. Using data from a four-year efficacy study of…

This article investigates the differences in academic achievement trajectories from elementary through middle school among English Learner (EL) students in four different instructional programs: English Immersion (EI), Transitional Bilingual (TB), Developmental Bilingual (DB), and Dual Immersion (DI). Comparing students with the same parental…

This study examines bi-literacy development among 60 children enrolled in an Italian-English dual language (DL) program in Southern California. Using a variety of measures including (1) oral reading fluency (ORF), (2) accuracy scores, and (3) standardized test for the assessment of reading (STAR) test's estimates of reading ability for English,…

As children learn to read, they become sensitive to the patterns that exist in the ways in which their language(s) are represented in print. This skill is known as orthographic processing. We examined the nature of orthographic processing in English and French for children in the first grade of a French immersion program, and the relationship…

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…