View Content #27110

By Linda Forrest, CASLS Research Director

Language immersion programs in K-12 schools not only enable students to acquire proficiency in more than one language, they also lead to improved outcomes in other academic subjects, increased cognitive skill development, and improved employment benefits (Fortune, 2012). This sounds like a win-win all around, but as in many other situations, there may be unintended, unforeseen negative consequences for even the most optimistic and well-intentioned project. A case in point occurred when Oregon’s Portland Public School district (PPS) opened an immersion program in one of their elementary schools.

“When PPS selected Woodstock Elementary School as the site of the Mandarin Dual Language Immersion Program, the neighborhood school had seen years of declining enrollment. The immersion program sought to stabilize enrollments and ward off an ultimate closure. In this, the immersion program succeeded admirably...

“As the immersion program grew and received national attention, the modest middle-class neighborhood changed. Parents from other parts of the country who had economic means moved to Portland and purchased property in the neighborhood, which gave them priority status in the immersion enrollment lottery. The influx of families with higher socioeconomic status changed the character of the neighborhood and contributed to the perception of the immersion program as an elitist one designed for affluent families. Over the course of two decades, home values increased significantly and disproportionately to the city of Portland as a whole. Some of the gentrification may have happened anyway, but school personnel know of many families who moved into the neighborhood specifically to place their children in the immersion program.” (Sykes et al, 2016, p. 19)

This PPS case illustrates one avenue by which introduction of an immersion school unintentionally increased inequity. Research by Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon (2014) examined two-way immersion (TWI) in North Carolina. Her studies showed that, “for English-speaking children the benefits of learning a foreign language at an earlier age within the regular academic curriculum and with ample opportunities to interact with native speakers of the language are obvious. Nevertheless, focusing only on the potential of TWI to result in bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism and to generate higher academic achievement for all students may blur critical issues of equity that could continue to disadvantage Latin@ children despite well-intended efforts” (Cervantes-Soon, 2014, p. 1).

The above examples depict negative consequences, but they do not imply that immersion programs should be avoided. Rather, immersion program development needs to incorporate information about such outcomes and deliberately and intentionally work to design programs which anticipate and mitigate negative consequences. Ideally such work will create truly equitable language education.

References

Cervantes-Soon, C. G. (2014) A Critical Look at Dual Language Immersion in the New Latin@ Diaspora, Bilingual Research Journal, 37:1, 64-82, DOI: 10.1080/15235882.2014.89326.

Fortune, T. W. (2012). What the research says about immersion. In V. Stewart (Ed.), Chinese Language Learning in the Early Grades, p. 9-13. AsiaSociety.org/Chinese.

Steele, J. L. et al. (2015). The Effect of Dual-Language Immersion on Student Achievement: Evidence from Lottery Data. RAND Corporation. Retrieved from www.pps.net/immersion.

Sykes, J. M., Forrest, L. B., & Carpenter, K. J. (2016). Building a Successful and Sustainable Language immersion Program: The Portland, Oregon, Mandarin Dual Language Experience. Eugene, OR: Center for Applied Second Language Study.