Blog Entry #1

Rossell, Christine H., and Keith Baker. "The Educational Effectiveness of Bilingual Education." Research in the Teaching of English 30.1 (1996): 7-74. Web. 27 Jan 2010.

Following the theme and discussion of last week’s class, “Language & Ideology,” I couldn’t stop thinking about the articles written by Garcia and Gonzalez and the concept of “English-only” instruction within the ESL classroom. I have so many questions about this concept and want to learn as much as possible about it and therefore, have chosen this topic had to be the focus of my blog for this course.

After spending a great deal of time researching different articles in several journals, I finally settled on Rossell and Baker’s article as posted above. Though the article was published over ten years ago, I felt that I should start my research on this topic further back in time in order to gain a better understanding of its development. Additionally, Rossell and Baker direct their focus on the question that I am most interested in, which is “whether bilingual education is the most effective instructional approach for LEP (Limited English Proficient) [students]” (8). The authors first establish what they call “transitional bilingual education” or TBE, a method in which “the student is taught to read and write in the native tongue, and subject matter is taught in the native tongue…[and] as the child progresses in English, the amount of instructional time in the native tongue is reduced and English increased” (10). The method of TBE is then studied in comparison with three other educational programs: submersion, English as a Second Languge, structured immersion. Of the 300 studies that the Rossell and Baker began with, only 72 proved to be “methodologically acceptable,” and they provide the quantitative data from these studies in an easy-to-read table format (19-20). The data was surprisingly very different than what I had anticipated, as a majority of the studies showed that the method of TBE had little or no effect on students’ academic success in comparison to the three other educational programs. In several instances, TBE actually proved to do more harm than English-only instruction (43). I was discouraged after reviewing the quantitative results as I had expected that TBE would prove to be extremely successful over the other methods. However, Rossell and Baker spend the rest of the article explaining that there can really be no “methodologically sound” studies in measuring this specific question and that it is near impossible to produce accurate quantitative data regarding the success rate of TBE. They conclude the article with an air of perseverance, as they offer two new hypotheses for testing in which (1) native tongue is used very minimally in LEP instruction, and (2) instructors are used for LEP students who are “familiar with, but not fluent in, the child’s native tongue” (40).

While this article did not provide the evidence that I had anticipated (or hoped for), I would still recommend it to anyone who is interested in bilingual education. The educational programs were interesting to learn about and the quantitative data provided some interesting findings.