Sent to Education Week, June 2, 2014
Lesli Maxwell is right: Things have changed dramatically since the dismantling of bilingual education in California caused by the passage of Proposition 227 ("Proposal to restore bilingual education in California advances," May 28). The most important change is that there is more evidence than ever that bilingual education works, that bilingual education does a better job of helping children acquire English than do all-English "immersion" programs.
In their paper, "The consistent outcome of bilingual education programs: A meta-analysis of meta-analyses." Profs. Grace McField and David McField considered all comparisons of bilingual education and English immersion that had been included in previous meta-analyses. They concluded that when both program quality and research quality are considered, the superiority of bilingual education was considerably larger than that reported in previous analyses.
This should settle the argument: bilingual programs, when set up correctly and evaluated correctly, do not prevent the acquisition of English – they facilitate it.
Their study is published in The Miseducation of English Learners, edited by Grace McField and published by Information Age Publishing earlier this year.
Stephen Krashen
original article: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/2014/05/proposal_to_restore_bilingual_.html?qs=lara
Lesli Maxwell is right: Things have changed dramatically since the dismantling of bilingual education in California caused by the passage of Proposition 227 ("Proposal to restore bilingual education in California advances," May 28). The most important change is that there is more evidence than ever that bilingual education works, that bilingual education does a better job of helping children acquire English than do all-English "immersion" programs.
In their paper, "The consistent outcome of bilingual education programs: A meta-analysis of meta-analyses." Profs. Grace McField and David McField considered all comparisons of bilingual education and English immersion that had been included in previous meta-analyses. They concluded that when both program quality and research quality are considered, the superiority of bilingual education was considerably larger than that reported in previous analyses.
This should settle the argument: bilingual programs, when set up correctly and evaluated correctly, do not prevent the acquisition of English – they facilitate it.
Their study is published in The Miseducation of English Learners, edited by Grace McField and published by Information Age Publishing earlier this year.
Stephen Krashen
original article: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/2014/05/proposal_to_restore_bilingual_.html?qs=lara
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