Libia Gil, assistant deputy secretary and director of the office of English language acquisition at the Federal Education Department, told the New York Times that while there was no definitive count of dual-language programs nationwide, there is clear indication of a rise.
In Utah, 9 percent of the public elementary school students are enrolled in dual-language programs. In Portland, 10 percent of all students and nearly one in five students participate. The efforts to increase the number of programs, and expand access to them, are starting in states including Delaware and North Carolina.
In New York City, there are 39 new or improved dual-language public-school programs this fall, in and an increase of about 25 programs from two years ago. The city has about 180 of such programs, according to the Department of Education. Languages that are taught now include Arabic, Chinese, French, Haitian-Creole, Hebrew, Korean, Polish and Russian, and Spanish.
In some local areas, the primary goal of expanding dual-language programs is to improve the access of the English-language to learners, officials at the city's Education Department stated.
Dos Puentes, an elementary school in the Washington Heights neighborhood in New York has a dual-language program, which means that subjects, like reading and math, are taught in two languages with the primary goal of making students bilingual. Once seen as a unconventional, dual-language programs are now being greatly favored by both native and nonnative English speakers, and in areas around the country their numbers have been booming.
Originally, these children were used to be taught almost exclusively in English. However according to new research while these students can take more time to adapt to a dual-language program, by late elementary or middle school they have the tendency to perform equally good or better than their peers academically, and may be more likely to be classified as proficient in English again.
Sean Reardon of Stanford University's Graduate School of Education, who has researched dual-language programs, stated that there might be a difference depending on what languages are being taught. While Spanish and English are similarly sounding, sharing an alphabet and many sounds, character-based languages like Chinese or Korean are quite different, and that it might make it more difficult for students to follow along.
