Are Immersion Programs the Answer for Bilingual Education in the United States?

Abstract

In a report on the effectiveness of bilingual education,the office of planning, budget, and evaluation, national institute of education, encouraged the use of immersion prograsm for American minority-language children. This paper discusses the limitations of immersion programs in the American context. A bilingual program must meet three criteria: the program must be fair to the children, it must be consistent with theories of linguistic and cognitive development, and it must be empirically supported. Various approaches are examined with respect to these criteria and an argument is made for the wider use of reverse immersion programs.