15-year-old bilingual author

Maria Vilchis, an ESL 8th grader in New Jersey, plans on becoming an author in both Spanish and English (Miguel Juarez in Tri-Town News).

Blog on bilingual issues

bililingual NYC, a new blog on bilingual issues in New York City, has just started.

School of Blog

I just came across the School of Blog this morning, a blog on immigrant and bilingual issues. Quite interesting.

Guiding Principles for Dual Language Education

The Center for Applied Linguistics is circulating a draft of their "Guiding Principles for Dual Language Education" and requesting feedback on it.

Georgia opens dual language elementary school

Georgia opens its first public, dual language school, an elementary school where students will be taught in both Spanish and English (Associated Press, CNN).

Dual-language programs in Texas

(Via L. Lamor Williams, Star-Telegram) Texas has a large percentage of Hispanic students: more than 30% of 80,000 students in Forth Worth and more than 30% of 16,000 in Arlington. Dual-language programs are becoming popular; there are 231 programs in Texas with approximately 606,000 students. In these programs, both English and Spanish speakers are in the same class with a curriculum taught half in English and half in Spanish for a period of years so that the students become fluent in both languages.

According to Mildred Vazquez, a bilingual teacher in the article, the students need to continue through the fifth grade (they begin in kindergarten) for the program to be effective. Obviously a school needs a large number of L2 students for the program to be viable, which limits the programs primarily to Spanish. And it's not a small commitment on the part of families, but if I had the opportunity, I would place my son in such a program.

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