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This qualitative study examines strategies used by children in a kindergarten dual language immersion (DLI) class, when enacting and negotiating intersecting social constructions such as ethnicity, social class, and bilingualism. Drawing on data collected during the 2017–2018 academic year, this paper uses an intersectional lens to describe the ways in which children are actively engaged in sociocultural processes of language use and socialization. In addition, it employs the notions of identity and social class position to analyze how children's bilingual understanding and strategic language use is manifested in different ways. The paper ends by encouraging educators and researchers to reconsider the way they evaluate power at work in educational settings and children's ways of displaying it. A more nuanced understanding of children's interactions in bilingual settings is necessary in order to stretch our considerations of power and social relations in present-day school contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dual language immersion (DLI) programs were developed in the U.S. with the expressed goal of supporting intercultural connections, bilingualism, biliteracy, and respect for diversity. However, these programs are still influenced by broader social ideas and power dynamics. From this perspective, this year-long ethnographic case study uses a sociocultural approach to examine the nature of young children's social experiences in DLI contexts. In particular, this study investigates how kindergarten children in a DLI class discern and navigate socially-constructed racial ideas. Data for this qualitative case study was collected through field notes, semi-structured interviews, and video recordings. The findings shed light on how race becomes a category that separates children and attaches particular meanings to individual subjects. This exploration helps to address antiblackness in DLI settings by analyzing how social constructions shape social practices, racial perceptions, and the socialization process in these programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study concerns integration in a two-way dual language immersion (DLI) context. Specifically, the present study examines parents of students in Korean-English DLI programs with the intent to understand the extent of their satisfaction with their child's ability to get along with children of different cultures and languages. This study also examines parental views on integration among parents themselves. Using the survey data collected from over 450 parents in seven elementary schools in southern California, this quantitative study also investigates to what degree the variables of integration among children and among parents are associated with other parental demographic characteristics and parental experiences in their child's DLI program. Based on the study findings, this study argues that integration in DLI must be a school-wide commitment and not simply a program's goal. Moreover, to achieve integration in DLI, all stakeholders of the program need to be considered, including students, educators, and families of students in the school. This study also highlights the need to diversify discussions regarding DLI programs in terms of target languages, program types, and school locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One Mandarin immersion programming model involves a pair of partner teachers switching cohorts of students. Many programs meet their staffing needs with international teachers that remain with the school district for 1–3 years. Due to transient staffing, many partner teachers find themselves as mentors to their immersion teachers and maintain the program's institutional knowledge. A national survey of 106 American teachers examined their attitudes regarding collaboration with their Chinese teacher, identification as a mentor, perceived administrative support, and school climate. Many participants worked in public elementary one‐way immersion programs classified as schools within a school; about 20% worked in full immersion schools. The partner teachers agreed that they felt connected to and supported by other staff in their building, and reported positive structures in place for student success. Respondents signaled a need for more professional development on immersion education, Chinese culture, and the partner teacher role. Some indicated administrators would promote the program without understanding it. Many reported the immersion teachers' needs for more targeted professional development about American culture and the education system because of misunderstandings at the building level. Despite concerns, partner teachers found the role challenging but professionally rewarding. The Challenge: With the growth of dual language immersion programs across the country and the current teacher shortage, many school districts have turned to hiring international teachers to fill their immersion needs. The stability of the international teachers' positions is tenuous; visa restrictions and instability of permanent staffing in immersion positions creates an additional burden on the partner teachers to maintain the immersion program and institutional knowledge. Understanding their experiences is crucial to the success of dual language immersion programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading and writing translate to centuries of shared knowledge and can be expanded upon with the ability to acquire multiple tongues. In response to today's most widely spoken languages, Chinese/English and Spanish/English dual language immersion programs continue to grow across the United States. Unfortunately, the lack of uniformity in the structure and implementation of national bilingual programs is as prominent as bilingual educators' concerns on how to best support emergent bilinguals in their development of biliteracy, while meeting state and national standards in both English and the partner language. Immersion classrooms will benefit from practical and effective ways to inform instruction for increased student engagement, greater access to bilingual education resources, and support to deliver content area instruction in the target language to both native and non-native English-speaking students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though Mandarin Chinese dual language immersion (DLI) has been growing rapidly in the U.S., research on this population is still rare. This study explored cross-language transfer of expressive oral vocabulary knowledge and definition skills among students in a Chinese DLI program. We found significant within and cross-language relationships of aspects of definition skills and cross-language relationships between expressive vocabulary and definition skills. Hierarchical regression revealed strong predictive association within and across languages for definition skills. Moderation analysis revealed that Chinese vocabulary knowledge had a moderating effect on the transfer of the syntagmatic aspect of Chinese definition skill to the corresponding skill in English. Educational implications and research recommendations are discussed in relation to an expanding framework of cross-language transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two-way immersion dual language education program design includes the use of language labels to identify students as either the English speaker or the speaker of a language other than English. This paper examines four focal student and two teacher interviews to consider the ways in which the idea of a 'language expert' transpired during individual student retrospective interviews. Data include video and audio recordings of student and teacher interviews, classroom observations of student interactions during their kindergarten, first and second grade years. This study draws from a raciolinguistic perspective to explore how power operates in sites where the categorization of language and race are negotiated. A distinctive goal of this paper includes understanding the ways in which students were perceived by their peers and classroom teachers as language learners in order to understand how power relations operated as the school demographics were changing. Findings indicate that race was entwined with social class and language in the ways students perceived one another. Implications for teacher education programs include raising an awareness of how teachers can both mitigate and shift power relations in culturally, ethnically and linguistically diverse contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we leverage in-depth interview to probe a Third Grade teacher's memories of the 2016–2017 School Year in a Spanish/English Dual Language Immersion (DL/I) school serving one of North Carolina's new Latinx communities. As our analysis will demonstrate, Mariana Castillo's interaction with the events of SY 16-17 combined with her still vivid memories as a child immigrant, led to her generalization that she was just another Brown body in the North Carolina piedmont—highlighting the emotional disequilibrium of teaching in the New Latino South and the unresolved tensions that social justice-equity oriented DL/I Latinx educators face when the branding of a state-led program is "instrumental/neoliberal oriented." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examine the Spanish proficiency progress of elementary Spanish-English bilinguals in three types of language program models: a dual language bilingual education (DLBE) model with a 90/10 language allocation, a DLBE model with a 50/50 language allocation, and an English as a Second Language (ESL) model over an academic year. In the domain of speaking, individual student characteristics were most predictive of progress. For listening and reading, time had the greatest impact on their Spanish language growth. With writing, the most impactful moderator was the teacher, and this was most predictive in the DLBE 90/10 model. Implications point to the need to provide immersive writing instruction and to arrange DLBE schedules to ensure the inclusion of writing. Oftentimes in 50/50 DLBE models, the domain of writing is least covered within the partner language with English taking precedence due to testing accountability. As provisions for dual language bilingual education are increasing, this study holds important implications for this model's impact on Spanish-English bilinguals' Spanish proficiency. Future studies will examine outcomes across time among emergent bilinguals in their native language, along with the potential influences of the student, the teacher, and the demographics of the school and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored the development of oral narrative retell proficiency among Mandarin Chinese-English dual language immersion (DLI) learners in Utah. The study compared the younger and the older DLI learners' oral narrative retelling production in order to provide information regarding the Mandarin narrative developmental trend of the DLI learners. A total of ten first graders and ten fifth graders who spoke English as their native language from a Mandarin DLI program in Utah were involved in this study. Oral narratives were elicited via retelling a story. MANOVA tests were run to detect any significant differences at the macrostructure and microstructure levels of the participants' narratives. The results showed significant differences in the older learners for many macrostructure and microstructure features; however, certain components in both macrostructure and microstructure features remain at similar levels. The results could be explained by children's typical progress in oral narrative development (e.g. progressing from word level through sentence and story formation), the DLI curriculum, and the difference between the Chinese and English language features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study explored the social and cultural capital of teachers in a rural Midwestern Spanish-English dual-language immersion (DLI) program as they overcame an Anglocentric epistemological hegemony in their daily practice. Working from Bourdieu’s (1986) theory of social capital and Rios-Aguilar and Kiyama’s (2012) approach to funds of knowledge, this research demonstrated that DLI teachers faced challenges ranging from resistance by non-DLI teachers in the school afraid of losing their jobs, to a broader fear of the DLI program taking resources away from the monolingual anglophone classrooms. To overcome these challenges, the DLI teachers drew extensively on their global social networks to resuscitate knowledge systems under attack from an Anglocentric epistemology, leveraging their existing social and cultural capital to benefit the community as a whole through an authentic Spanish-language epistemology.

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Five cohorts of students (N = 322) who completed a K–5 Spanish Dual Language Immersion (DLI) program in an urban school district were followed longitudinally through middle and high school completion. Academic and language achievement data included English Language Arts and Mathematics scores on the Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) test for grades 3–8 and on the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) for 11th grade, 10th‐grade cumulative high school grade point average, enrollment in and grades earned in language classes, and attainment of the California Seal of Biliteracy. The DLI students were compared to non‐DLI students who attended the same schools. Most DLI students continued with advanced level classes in Spanish in high school, and nearly half earned the California Seal of Biliteracy. Achievement results indicate that DLI graduates performed at equivalent or higher levels than non‐DLI students on standardized achievement measures for English Language Arts and Mathematics. The Challenge: How do graduates of elementary Dual Language Immersion (DLI) programs compare to non‐DLI students in secondary school? The challenge is the scarcity of longitudinal research on DLI graduates. We followed 5th grade DLI students through 12th grade finding that they continue language study and that their achievement in English Language Arts and Mathematics is similar to non‐DLI students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dual language immersion (DLI) programs have emerged in the U.S. as effective ways to bring together language minority and language majority speakers in school settings with the goal of bilingualism and bi-literacy for all. However, the proliferation of these programs has raised concerns regarding issues of inequity and dissimilar power dynamics in these spaces (Cervantes-Soon, 2014, "A Critical Look at Dual Language Immersion in the New Latin@ Diaspora." Bilingual Research Journal 37 (1): 64–82; Flores, 2016, Do Black Lives matter in Bilingual Education [Web log post]. Accessed May 1, 2017. https://educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2016/09/11/do-black-lives-matter-in-bilingual-education/; Valdes, 1997, "Dual language immersion programs: A cautionary note concerning the education of language-minority students." Harvard Educational Review 67: 391–430, 2018, "Analyzing the curricularization of language in two-way immersion education: Restating two cautionary notes." Bilingual Research Journal). With this in mind, this study aims to shed light on the intricate social processes at work in DLI contexts. In particular, this paper examines first, how notions of language use, race, and ethnicity are socially constructed and intersect in DLI settings; and second, it explores how these ideas are discerned and re-shaped by young children into their own social and linguistic norms. Employing qualitative research methods, this year-long ethnographic case study uses the intersectional lens of raciolinguistics (Alim, Rickford & Ball, 2016, Raciolinguistics: how language shapes our ideas about race. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; Rosa & Flores, 2017, "Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective." Language in Society 46 (5): 621–647), to examine the intricate cross-cutting dynamics at play in bilingual spaces. The exploration of these ideas helps to illuminate the ways in which language practices and interactions are shaped by social constructions from a very early age. Furthermore, it contributes to understandings of social perceptions and relations in multilingual/multicultural/multiethnic contemporary school settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explored whether emergent bilingual children showed enhanced abilities to learn L3 vocabulary including written, spoken and conceptual forms compared to monolinguals, and the impact of L2/L3 cross-language similarities on such an effect. To this end, we contrasted the English word learning performance of French fifth-graders attending either a monolingual school program or a classroom-immersion program with German as an L2. Half of the items to be learned were German/English (L2/L3) cognate words while the other half were monolingual English (L3) words. Learning was assessed with a forced-choice recognition task, a go/no-go auditive recognition task and an orthographic judgment task. Results yielded a generalized bilingual advantage, with classroom-immersion children outperforming monolinguals on all tasks, irrespective of cognateness, except for the orthographic task. These findings advocate for a bilingual advantage in children that is globally not driven by the specific language properties of cognates, except for the written modality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assesses the long-term linguistic and academic outcomes associated with different bilingual language education models for low-income dual language learners (DLLs) residing in a bilingual, bicultural context. As part of the Miami School Readiness Project (MSRP), we analyzed the impact of program model on gains in English language proficiency and 5th grade standardized achievement in reading and math and grade point average (GPA) for five cohorts of DLLs followed throughout elementary school. Participants had been enrolled in public pre-K programs or received childcare subsidies to attend center- or family-childcare from 2002 to 2007 in Miami-Dade County, Florida (N = 20,870). Controlling for several student-level background variables correlated with educational outcomes, correlational and multiple regression analyses revealed that bilingual, rather than monolingual, forms of instruction were associated with acquiring English faster and superior performance in all measures of 5th grade academic achievement. Importantly, two-way immersion models that support the home language and culture and integrate language majority and minority learners were associated with faster English acquisition, which mediated the link between Two-Way Immersion (TWI) programs and higher GPAs. We discuss the implications of our findings for educational policy and practice and highlight future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: Public school enrollment in the United States is becoming increasingly racially and linguistically diverse; however, school segregation continues to intensify across the nation. Within this context, two-way dual language immersion (TWI) programs, which intentionally strive to balance English learners and English speakers, may create a natural opportunity for integration. Research Question: How do teachers and leaders facilitate integrative interactions among students of different racial and linguistic groups in a TWI program? Research Design: This qualitative, holistic, single case study explores the TWI program at Silverthorne Elementary School (pseudonym), a K-5 traditional public school in the southeastern United States. Silverthorne is in a rural community on the outskirts of a large metropolitan area that is a new immigrant destination. At the time of data collection, Silverthorne's TWI program was in its seventh year of implementation. Participants include 12 teachers, one guidance counselor, and one school leader. We conducted semi-structured individual interviews with all participants, observed eight classrooms, and analyzed supplemental documents. We used inductive coding and ultimately generated four themes to describe how TWI teachers and leaders facilitate integration. Findings: Silverthorne's TWI program provides an opportunity to facilitate integration among students from different racial and linguistic backgrounds. The nature of these integrative experiences is shaped by the structure of the TWI program, the teachers' conceptualizations of diversity, the teachers' pedagogical and curricular decisions, and the school leader's support of the TWI program. Conclusion: Although teachers and leaders in the Silverthorne TWI program have promoted integration in numerous ways, they also have missed important opportunities to facilitate greater integration. Nonetheless, this TWI program illustrates the potential of TWI to provide opportunities for students from different racial and linguistic backgrounds to learn together in a truly integrated environment. Findings suggest the need for enhanced professional development regarding how to facilitate integration in diverse classrooms as well as future research to understand how, if at all, integration is considered when districts and schools are designing and implementing TWI programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Georgia and North Carolina are part of what some call the New Latinx South, a region where Latinx populations more than doubled recently. Both states have struggled to educate language minoritized students (evidenced by low graduation rates), yet are among the top three states for numbers of dual language (DL) programs in the Southeast. This model integrates English speakers and speakers of a minoritized language to promote biliteracy for all, disrupting a legacy of English-only education. Such contradictions, along with the Southeast's complex history of racial relations, create tensions and opportunities for DL. Through media content analysis, informed by LatCrit, we examined discourses about DL to determine ways DL is framed and conceived. Findings demonstrate how public discourses perpetuated notions of whom DL should serve, and for what purposes. The discussion identifies spaces of resistance DL supporters can engage to promote democratic, rather than neoliberal, articulations of DL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research on development of German reading comprehension with two-way immersion, a part of the popular bilingual instruction in primary schools.