International Journal of Bilingual
Education and Bilingualism
Editor: Colin Baker, University of Wales, Bangor
Review Editor: Aneta Pavlenko, Temple University, Philadelpia
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Volume: 1 Number: 2 Page: 134–148
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What Two-way Bilingual Programmes Reveal About the Controversy Surrounding Race and Intelligence
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Elena Nicoladis, Donald M. Taylor, Wallace E. Lambert and Mary Cazabon
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One of the most promising ways of developing bilingual skills of students in the United States is through 'two-way immersion' programmes, where 50% of the students are native English speakers and 50% speakers
of a minority language and where half the teaching is done by professional teachers who use either English only or the minority language only. In 'two-way immersion' programmes, little attention has been
paid to the experiences of African-American students, who, in conventional programmes, persistently perform poorly relative to English native white children, especially on tests of English achievement or
on intelligence tests. If the poor performance of African-American youngsters is due to genetically determined deficits, as some specialists argue, we would expectthem to perform poorly on achievement tests
in both languages. The present study focuses on African-American students' maths and reading achievement in a Spanish-English two-way immersion programme, from Grade 1 to Grade 4. The results show that
the African-American children perform significantly lower than majority white students on English achievement tests at all grades. However, there is no significant difference between the two ethnic groups
in Spanish achievement in the early grades. The results of this study point to the primary role of social/environmental factors in the comparatively lower scores of African-American children on standardised
English achievement tests.
© Multilingual Matters 1998
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