The 2024 Central States Conference was held in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 14-16. This year's theme, Reclaim Your Joy!, reflects the choice we make every day as educators to bring the joy of acquiring a language to our students. Even though the last several years have been fraught with challenges, we are finding ways to bring back the joy into…

This three-article dissertation examined how policy choices in three key policy areas -- initial enrollment, service provision, and reclassification -- impact English learner (EL)-classified students. The first article examined the national landscape of state statutes, regulations, and state education agencies' (SEA) guidance that support…

However influential the interdependence hypothesis has become in bilingual research, it still lacks full empirical support. This longitudinal study explores the parallels in the biliteracy development (L1 Spanish and L2 English) of 20 students in a European immersion programme (i.e. CLIL) over a two-year period. A bilingual learner corpus of…

The classroom demographics in French immersion (FI) programs across Canada are changing: There are a growing number of multilingual students who are learning English as a second language (L2) and French as a third language (L3). However, little is known about the development of French language proficiency and reading skills of multilingual…

A Mandarin/English two-way immersion elementary program is described from its inception and implementation through the fifth grade, the culminating year of the program. All students in all grades were assessed on their oral/listening, reading, and writing performance in Mandarin using program-created assessment measures. Fifth-grade students also…

The relationship between first language (L1) typology, defined as the classification of languages according to their structural characteristics (e.g. phonological systems and writing systems), and the development of second (L2) and third (L3) language skills and literacy proficiency in multilingual children was investigated in this study. The…

In a Grade 9 core French class, the teacher designed a multi-stage project in which students composed original children's stories in French; illustrated their stories to produce picture books; then, in groups, adapted one group member's story into a play script; and, finally, dramatized the scripts for children from the local French immersion…

As classrooms across the U.S. are becoming increasingly more multilingual and multicultural, there is a need for research that provides insight into literacy instruction that builds on students' linguistic knowledge. The qualitative study of a fourth-grade dual-language classroom examined the ways that peer mediation in Spanish and English…

Modeled after the pioneering French immersion programs developed in Canada in the 1960s, foreign language immersion programs in the United States are designed to enrich the education of native-English-speaking students by teaching them all of their academic subjects in a second language. The goal is for students to become proficient in the second…

The issue of whether to separate English language development (ELD) into a separate instructional block or whether to integrate it with reading/language arts instruction is an unanswered question with theoretical and practical implications. We addressed this question by observing instruction across the year in 85 kindergarten classrooms that…

Several research and evaluation studies completed in bilingual education programs for language minority children in Canada are presented to support the claim that heritage, or first, language (HL) literacy plays an important role in the acquisition of a third language. A study completed by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education…

A key to closing the achievement gap between students who come to school speaking a language other than English and native English speakers is adoption of two-way bilingual immersion (TWBI) programs. The bilingual immersion approach fosters excellent academic achievement and positive school attitudes in students of any ethnicity who participate.…

The textbook for training bilingual education teachers addresses psychological and social questions that enable teachers to define more clearly what they want to do in a classroom, and offers theoretical and practical information for a variety of social contexts. The first section addresses individualism and the social nature of bilingualism, and…

The authors conducted an experiment during the 2003-2004 school year to determine whether "On Our Way to English" ("OWE"), a product to help elementary students learn to read and speak English, was more effective in a California and a Texas school district than materials already in place. In the California study, 384 English…

The authors were asked to find out whether "On Our Way to English" ("OWE"), a supplementary, text-based product to help elementary school students learn to read and speak English was more effective in a California and a Texas school district than the materials the districts already had in place. They conducted an experiment…