Jennifer Steele

The purpose of this two-year grant was to create partnership to assess the causal effects of immersion program participation on student achievement. Dual language immersion (DLI) refers to programs in which students receive general academic instruction in two languages beginning in the early grades. In Utah, DLI programs come in two forms: two-way programs, in which at least a third of the students in a classroom are native speakers of each of the two classroom languages (here, English and a...

Dual-language immersion programs seek to help the growing number of language minority students learn English and achieve academically, while giving language majority students the opportunity to develop proficiency in another language. These programs differ fundamentally from traditional foreign language programs in two important ways: 1) teachers deliver regular curricular content through a "partner language" (such as Spanish or Russian), but do not generally teach the partner language direc...