THE EDUCATIONAL-EFFECTIVENESS OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION

Bilingual education is the use of the native tongue to instruct limite d English-speaking children. The authors read studies of bilingual edu cation from the earliest period of this literature to the most recent. Of the 300 program evaluations read, only 72 (25%) were methodologica lly acceptable-that is, they had a treatment and control group and a s tatistical control for pie-treatment differences where groups were not randomly assigned. Virtually all of the studies in the United States were of elementary or junior high school students and Spanish speakers . The few studies conducted outside the United States were almost all in Canada. The research evidence indicates that, on standardized achie vement tests, transitional bilingual education (TBE) is better than re gular classroom instruction in only 22% of the methodologically accept able studies when the outcome is reading, 7% of the studies when the o utcome is language, and 9% of the studies when the outcome is math. TE E is never better than structured immersion, a special program for lim ited English proficient children where the children are in a self-cont ained classroom composed solely of English learners, but the instructi on is in English at a pace they can understand. Thus, the research evi dence does not support transitional bilingual education as a superior form of instruction for limited English proficient children.