ABSTRACT
United States public schools offer several programs for language-minority students
learning English at school. Most of these programs seek to transition students to
all-English classrooms as soon as they have reached a certain level of English proficiency
(for a description of bilingual education programs, see Crawford, 1995). But some
programs, including dual-immersion or two-way bilingual immersion programs,
encourage the development of students’ first language (L1) as well as their English by
imparting the curriculum in both languages.1 These schools also target language majority students. Ideally, half of the students in the classroom are native English speakers
learning the minority language, in this case Spanish, as a second language (L2).
