Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons^™

The Psychological Impact Of English Language Immersion On Elementary Age English Language Learners, Elena B. Parra, Carol A. Evans, Todd Fletcher, Mary C. Combs

Journal of Multilingual Education Research

To date, most studies about English language learners (ELLs) in Structured English Immersion (SEI) classrooms in the state of Arizona have focused on ELLs’ lack of English acquisition in one year, a time frame expected by Arizona policymakers, as well as their lagging academic progress. While these studies almost uniformly have surfaced educational and policy concerns about the effectiveness of SEI, the debate about this approach has been marked by a lack of attention to research addressing the non-academic ramifications of enforcing this model on children who speak or understand little or no English. One relatively unexamined consequence of the …