Which practices work best for bilingual schoolchildren?

English language learners (ELLs) comprise over 10 percent of the nation’s public schoolchildren, most of them receiving in- or out-of-classroom support in English-only schools. Yet, a smaller but growing percentage attend bilingual schools, alternately learning in English and their native language — most commonly Spanish in the U.S.

“We tend to see two recommendations in public schools: Either you’re completely separating the languages or you’re using all the languages available for the student,” says Clark Professor Alena Esposito, a developmental psychologist and expert on bilingual education who once taught kindergarten. “Neither recommendation has empirical support beyond a few case studies.”

Recent guidelines for bilingual education in the U.S. are based on English/French dual-language programs in Québec.

“Our population of students in bilingual education in the U.S. is very different from the students they are typically teaching in Québec,” Esposito says. “We are designing our bilingual education programs around one that has never actually been explored experimentally to see if it works.”

Now, in a first-of-its-kind, longitudinal study funded by a $780,000 National Science Foundation grant, Esposito and her colleagues will examine — and more importantly, measure — which language practices are associated with the best student outcomes in racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse bilingual schools in the U.S.

 “We’re looking at what the teachers have figured out,” she says.

“When the fire alarm went off, we needed to communicate with children in a language they understood.”

— alena esposito

They especially want to know the effectiveness of teachers’ adopting flexible “trans-languaging or bridging” practices, where they might use two or more languages “to help make sure that the content is understood by students,” Esposito says.

In her experience of teaching in bilingual schools, “when the fire alarm went off, we needed to communicate with children in a language they understood,” she says. “And that raises the question: Is using only one language at a time, and never bending that rule, advantageous for children?”

The four-year study will focus on cohorts of “emerging bilinguals” and “emerging multilinguals” from kindergarten through fourth grade in Worcester Public Schools that include both bilingual education and “sheltered English immersion” (SEI) programs — “pull-in” or “pull-out” classroom supports. During this pilot year, the researchers are partnering with the Worcester Dual Language Magnet School (formerly Chandler Magnet), with the plan to add more schools next year.

Esposito is partnering with co-principal investigator Jennifer Coffman, a developmental psychologist and director of the Child and Family Resource Center at North Carolina State University, Greensboro. University of Massachusetts Lowell psychologist Joseph Gonzales will assist with the data analyses plan.

During the school year, video and audio technology will capture interactions between elementary school teachers and their students. Esposito and her research team — comprising undergraduate and Ph.D. students and a post-baccalaureate project manager — will then measure and analyze how the teachers communicated.

An expert in methodology for classroom observations, Coffman will teach Esposito and her student researchers how to “code” each 30-second interaction between teachers and students so the taped communications can be more easily measured and analyzed. Coupled with the school’s regular assessments, the researchers hope to better understand the connections between teachers’ language practices and students’ cognitive development.

“Our goal is to find out what those teachers are doing and use that as the basis for empirical work,” Esposito says, “so that policies and practices are based on actual evidence.”