The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of a one-way dual language bilingual education (DLBE) program on students' academic growth. One-way DLBE programs address students from the same language background and in the particular program all students are language majority speakers (i.e. Americans); according to Baker and Wright (2021), such programs are essentially world language immersion programs. The specific program was launched in 2017-2018 in Delaware, U.S. in a K-12 school with Greek as L2. The school offers a choice between two programs: (a) the immersion, and (b) the CLIL program. Both programs provide curricular instruction in Greek; in particular, 25% of the curriculum in CLIL and 50% of the curriculum in the immersion program is taught in Greek. As students of both programs come from the same geographical area and a similar SES background, the context offers itself for various comparative studies between the two cohorts of students (immersion vs CLIL). The school is implementing the partial immersion type of education and the core academic content is split by subject area between two teachers; the Greek teacher teaches math, science and Greek language arts, while the American partner teaches social studies and English language arts. The program aims to give learners the opportunity to acquire Greek through the study of academic disciplines and also develop their interactive skills in Greek as a foreign language. The present study will compare the two programs as to their impact on students' academic growth in ELA and Math. The study draws data from students in grades 1-4 over a period of four years; the data include students' results in standardized ELA and Math tests. Our findings indicate that the immersion group outperforms the non-immersion group in ELA almost in all grades every year. Regarding their performance in Math, the non-immersion group outperforms the immersion one in lower grades but as students move up the grades achievement differences between the two groups tend to decrease and the immersion cohort outperforms the non-immersion cohort in grades 3 and 4. The results of our study add to current research in the impact of immersion education on academic achievement (see Lindholm-Leary and Genesee, 2014) and support the positive impact of dual language education on curriculum performance.
References
Baker, C. and Wright, W.E. (2021).(7th edition) Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Multilingual Matters.
Lindholm-Leary, K.J. and Genesee, F. (2014). Student outcomes in one-way, two-way, and indigenous language immersion education. Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education 2(2), 165-180.
