Austin ISD transitions to dual-language bilingual program

At Joslin Elementary School in South Austin, the changes to the bilingual education curriculum are starting to take shape. Austin Independent School District is partnering with Gómez & Gómez, a dual language training institute that started in South Texas, to transition its bilingual program from a late-exit bilingual model to a dual-language program.

Joslin Elementary has about 300 students, with one-third of their population being in bilingual classes. They are one of the nine elementary schools of AISD that offer a bilingual program for their students. AISD only offers bilingual programs in Spanish and Vietnamese. If students speak another language, they are put into English as a Second Language program. Bilingual programs use the native language for academic instruction whereas ESL programs are generally all in English.

Bilingual education is mandated by the Texas Education Code, which requires that school districts offer a bilingual program in kindergarten through the elementary grades if they have an enrollment of 20 or more students of limited English proficiency in any language classification in the same grade level.

“My boy is in bilingual education because he doesn’t speak English and also so he doesn’t forget Spanish,” said Reyna Hernandez, mother of a child who is in pre-K at Joslin Elementary. “They teach them in Spanish first then in English the numbers, the letters, shapes and everything.”

Bilingual education comes in many different forms. There is a late-exit program that starts with students receiving instruction in their native language in the early years and eventually completely dropping off the native language by around fourth or fifth grade. The dual language program features two different types: one-way and two-way.

One-way dual language is designed to teach native Spanish-speakers English by incorporating English steadily throughout their education. Two-way dual language is designed to teach native English-speakers Spanish, and native Spanish-speakers English simultaneously. They receive instruction in both languages.

When Sandra Valle, a first grade teacher at Joslin Elementary started teaching there was a transitional model where students received instruction in Spanish.

“Once they’ve developed enough English to be successful there is no more instruction in Spanish,” Valle said. “In the past three years we’ve started implementing a dual language program where we our goal is to develop bilingual students to be biliterate from pre-K through fifth grade so they continue their Spanish instruction along with their English instruction.”

With the new dual language models, campuses are able to choose whether to do one-way or two-way, but in AISD the one-way model is the most used.

“Depending on your campus population, it determines which model fits best,” Joslin Elementary principal Jennifer Pace said. “If it’s better for your campus to have a two-way or one-way and, depending on the part of town you’re in, you may have a lot of parents of native English-speakers who want their kids to learn Spanish or you may have a population of native Spanish-speakers that need to learn English.”

Gómez & Gómez is a dual language enrichment model program and according to their research, the benefits of dual language enrichment include full closure of the academic achievement gap, bilingualism and biliteracity for all children, a cognitive advantage because of balanced bilinguals, and future economic advantages with job opportunities.

“When you look at the hierarchy of student outcome, because bilingual programs teach in both languages, often times in those first two to four years the test scores are not at parity because the kids are basically learning twice as much as everybody else,” said Rebecca Callahan, assistant professor in bilingual and bicultural education at the University of Texas at Austin. “Once you get past fourth and fifth grade, kids who’ve been in bilingual programs test much higher, significantly higher than children who have been in ESL programs and their language minority peers who have been in English-only or ESL environments.”

According to the Gómez & Gómez model, dropping the Spanish is harmful for students’ education and wants to move a away from the late-exit model.

“I believe it is to address the need that our English language learners typically score lower than their peers on the standardized tests,” Valle said. “The dual language program hopes to develop both languages so that the students’ Spanish language abilities are used to teach their English language but also to develop those concepts that they might understand better in Spanish than they do in English.”

One of the problems that students and educators in bilingual dual language programs face is standardized tests.

“Texas allows students to be assessed in their primary language, but students can only be assessed in one language,” Callahan said. “Even though children in dual language programs are learning math in one language and social studies in another they are going to have to choose which language to take the assessment and because the teachers know that they may have to assess the kids only in English they may go heavier on English instruction in the classroom.”

Teachers face the decision of whether they should teach “true” dual language course by not giving preference to a language which is what Gómez & Gómez is pushing for, or whether they should focus on one language in hopes that students will show better results in state mandated testing.

“I’m still concerned if they’ll be as proficient as their peers in the future,” Valle said. “I just have to be more patient, I suppose, to let them work through that language acquisition, those stages of language acquisition, and their literacy development. But when I compare my first graders to the English speaking first graders and how much they can read compared to their peers in English, I worry about how behind they are.”

The Texas Education Agency is trying to address problems with standardized testing with a modified STAAR test for English Language Learners, called the STAAR L, but according to website, it is only available from third to fourth grade. The STAAR L is taken on a computer and allows students to hover over certain words for a definition if they don’t understand.

Children are not automatically enrolled in the bilingual program. Parents fill out a survey at the beginning of the year and the school goes from there.

“We have a committee that decides based on the responses of the home language survey,” McKinnon said. “Their parents approve, so it’s always up to the parents to decide whether or not they want their child in bilingual education.”

Teachers believe that students who are native Spanish speakers would benefit by being taught in both languages.

“If a parent who speaks Spanish in their house wants to have their children in the regular education they can do that,” Maldonado said. “If it comes to that and we know they speak Spanish in the house we try to educate them and say, ‘Look, your child is better off if he is taught in his native language because he doesn’t have to translate everything and he will get what you are teaching.’ Otherwise they have to translate if they don’t have support at home.

This story was written for a class assignment in March 2014.