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.