How Does Bilingual Instruction Enhance English Achievement? A Mixed-Methods Study of Cantonese-Speaking and Spanish-Speaking Bilingual Classrooms

When literacy instruction is integrated and contextualized in a child's background knowledge and daily experiences, learning is increased. This mixed-methods study describes effective bilingual instruction in second-grade classrooms in the United States where teachers utilize students' linguistic capital and foster home-school connections, two factors that may assist in successful academic outcomes. Data were collected in four second-grade transitional bilingual classrooms in two working-class neighborhoods in a city in Northern California. A total of 34 Spanish-speaking English language learners and 33 Cantonese-speaking English language learners participated in the study. Students were assessed on a variety of English and native-language measures, home background data were collected from parental questionnaires, and classroom variables were collected from classroom observations and teacher interviews. Despite consistent findings in previous studies that ELLs tend to perform poorly on English reading comprehension measures when compared to monolinguals, on average, the bilingual children in this study had similar or even better scores when compared to their monolingual peers on both English decoding and reading comprehension measures.