[ELTWeekly Volume 6, Issue 11 | April 14, 2014 | ISSN 0975-3036]
Andrew Myers says, “Like a growing number of school systems across the country, San Francisco Unified School District is tasked with educating increasing rolls of students for whom English is not their first language. In the United States, the school-aged population has grown a modest 10 percent in the last three decades, while the number of children speaking a language other than English at home has soared by 140 percent.
Against this backdrop, researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) and San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) are examining student performance in various types of English-language learning programs.
The first focuses on how long it takes non-English-speaking students to reach English proficiency and be reclassified out of English learner (EL) status. The second looks at the same students’ academic trajectories over time, comparing outcomes of four English-learner instructional program types.
The results show that while students in English immersion programs perform better in the short term, over the long term students in classrooms taught in two languages not only catch up to their English immersion counterparts, but they eventually surpass them, both academically and linguistically”.