A Comparison Study of the Efficacy of Self-contained Bilingual Education and Monolingual General Education for Bilingual Students
Abstract
There are two program models under consideration in this study. The first
model is self-contained bilingual, which includes students who are learning both
English and Spanish and speak mostly Spanish at home. This group is receiving
the majority of their academic instruction in Spanish at school. The second group
is the monolingual general education group. The students studied in the
monolingual general education program include students who speak Spanish
and English at home and receive most, if not all, of their academic instruction in
English. The purpose of this investigation was to determine if there is a difference
in efficacy between the two programs and student groups. This information is
needed in order to make coherent and understandable recommendations to
parents who are deciding which program to place their bilingual child in. The
results show that the self-contained bilingual students outperformed the bilingual
students in the monolingual program on the Northwest Evaluation Association
Measures of Academic Performance in the area of mathematics, but not in
reading. It is also noted that the two groups of students, when grouped together,
performed better in mathematics than in reading. The recommendation to
parents of bilingual children, taking into account the results of this research, is to place students in the self-contained bilingual education program.