ABSTRACT
In Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society, authors Carola and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and Irina Todorova (2008) describe their interdisciplinary, longitudinal study with 400 adolescent immigrant students who have lived in the United States for an average of seven years. The authors report that just 7 percent of the cohort scored at or above the average of their native Englishspeaking peers for English Language Proficiency on the Bilingual Verbal Abilities Tests (BVAT) (Muñoz-Sandoval, Cummins, Alvarado, & Ruef, 1998).1 Counter to a number of existing naïve beliefs about multilingual learners, the Learning in a New Land study found that it did not matter what first language the adolescents spoke or what country of origin the students and their families had hailed from; the same levels of English language proficiency performance were reported for adolescents whether they were from Central America, China, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, or Mexico.
