Spanish language development in an elementary school two-way immersion program

[摘要] This study analyzed the level of proficiency in the minority language, Spanish, of students in the final years of a two-way immersion program at Mark Twain Elementary School in Houston, Texas. The level of proficiency of these two-way immersion students was gauged by comparing their oral narratives to those produced by the monolingual Spanish speakers in Eugenia Sebastian and Dan I. Slobin's 1994 study, ;;Development of Linguistic Forms: Spanish.;; The Spanish-dominant and native English-Spanish bilingual students in the program were found to have a high level of proficiency in Spanish. However, the English-dominant students in the program have not attained a native-like proficiency in Spanish. Thus, the program, while beneficial for both native and non-native Spanish speakers, is still somewhat lacking in its linguistic education of non-native Spanish speakers.

[发布机构] Rice University

[效力级别] Literature