Sixth International Conference on Immersion and Dual Language Education: Connecting Research and Practice Across Contexts

Paper/Best Practice Session (1 hour)

Multiple

One-Way Second/Foreign Language Immersion
Two-Way Bilingual Immersion

Elementary (K-5)

This paper session will analyze and contextualize math achievement data for Utah dual immersion students. After presenting research findings, we will discuss key features and challenges of the dual immersion math curriculum and its instructions to better understand and situate the data.

This paper will contextualize research on math achievement of Utah dual language immersion (DLI) students. After presenting our findings, we will discuss the key features and challenges of the DLI math program to better understand and situate the data.

Studies in Canada (e.g. Lambert, Tucker and d'Anglejan, 1973; Turnbull, Hart and Lapkin, 2003), and U.S.based studies, which often focus on EL outcomes (e.g. Lindholm-Leary & Block, 2010; Thomas & Collier, 2015), have found benefits of instruction in two languages. However, most recently, a large-scale study in Portland (Steele et al., 2015), which, unlike many others, tightly controlled for selection bias, found little benefit in terms of mathematics and science performance, but also no detriment. In Utah, we conducted two large-scale studies to measure Utah students’ math performance in third and in forth grade. Our third grade study compared students’ math scores in relation to their ELA achievement to control for pre-existing differences between DLI and non-DLI students. We found that DLI students who attained the same levels in ELA performed at the same level as their non-DLI peers. For the forth grade study, we compared DLI students to a propensity-matched non-DLI group, and found that DLI students grew more in math than their counterparts not in DLI. We will also present the results of a current study that will determine whether the third and forth grade results hold for students in fifth grade.

The second part of the session will discuss the curricular context for the research data by first providing an overview of Utah’s math curriculum, which, with the exception of Spanish is largely uniform across Utah’s five immersion languages. We will then focus on programmatic and instructional challenges, such as the implications for cultural authenticity when using materials translated from English, target language use, and standardized English testing.