Immersion Education 1
Running Head: IMMERSION EDUCATION
Immersion Education:
Identifying Effective Reading Programs
Shane Hudson-Connor
Pacific University
Immersion Education 2
Abstract
A point of agreement between opponents and proponents of bilingual education, or immersion, is that
research supports the cognitive benefits of bilingualism and bilingual education. A polemic that
pervades bilingual education concerns the most effective and cost efficient models of immersion. In the
primary grade levels (pre-K through third grade) it is the view of this research project that reading is the
most fundamental skill that should be taught. Therefore, the most effective reading and early literacy
programs should be examined for their content, quality, and ability to pique student interest and
engagement. This purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of the already existing reading
program at a Spanish immersion school in increasing word attack and decoding skills. The program was
found to be effective in increasing word attack and decoding skills, but the extent of its effectiveness
needs further examination, especially in comparison with other reading programs.
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Introduction
My experience as a preschool teacher at Head Start during the past five years has heavily
influenced my view of bilingual education. Although Head Start is not a bilingual education program by
definition, regional operations do recognize the need for bilingual staff and teachers due to high
populations of Spanish-speaking families within their service areas. The bilingual educational program in
each Head Start classroom then is truly up to the teacher. Every classroom incorporates a different level
of Spanish instruction, from English immersion to transitional models of bilingual education where
Spanish is used to develop core content areas and facilitate a shift to English immersion in Kindergarten.
My classrooms during the past three years, for example, have had at least five native Spanish
speaking students in a class of nineteen. All of these students were at different levels of English
language acquisition based on a vast array of factors, such as number of siblings at home, level of
parental involvement, whether or not the family attended church, the socioeconomic status of the
family and cognitive abilities of the student. One outcome I noticed in my classroom, in comparison
with other Head Start classrooms at my site, was that several of my students kept using their primary
language throughout the school year for the majority of their interactions with other peers. It seemed
that students who were in English immersion classes eventually switched to only using English to
interact at school, since English was modeled to be the contextually appropriate language. However, in
my classroom I spoke in both languages with students at an academic level and at a conversational level,
because I believe that the use of multiple languages within a classroom is beneficial for all students,
especially if that second language is the primary language of another student in the class.
Upon researching the different models of immersion, I discovered that in my practice I was
scratching the surface of an enrichment model of bilingual education, where both languages are used
for conversational and academic language and are both equally valued and important. The details of my
experience at Head Start are outside of the scope of this paper, but they did serve as an important
Immersion Education 4
framework as I sought to define the different types of immersion education programs and their
effectiveness for the demographic of students to which they serve.
Head Start serves a low-income demographic in Lane County and provides basic administrative
and family services to Spanish-speaking families in their home language. The Head Start site I worked at
had a 33% Hispanic student population (66% non-Hispanic), with 16% of this Hispanic population
identified as dual language learners (Head Start database). This research project was conducted at an
Elementary Spanish immersion program that serves a middle class, mostly White demographic
(greatschools.org). The curriculums and reading programs used at Head Start were similar with those of
the Spanish immersion school (which will be referred to as SIS, for brevity), due in part somewhat to the
developmental programs adopted by both schools that focus on phonics, letter recognition, and
phonological awareness, but also because Head Start makes an effort to have Spanish literature and
bilingual staff on hand to incorporate into their main curriculum.
The SIS examined is officially labeled as a two-way 90/10 immersion program, where 90% of the
classroom instructional time is delivered in the target language (Spanish). Based on my observations
however, I saw that students are being presented vocabulary and concepts across subjects both in
Spanish and English throughout the day. Based on definitions by Mary, Hill, and Tiakiwai (2004) the SIS
studied would be considered to use a traditional immersion program, which teaches English dominant
students with an initial emphasis on the minority language (p. 78). The teachers I spoke with at the SIS
told me they are asked to prescribe to this 90/10 program of instruction, but they supplement
instruction with English more often to ensure that students understand key concepts so they do not fall
behind academically, even though Donna Christian found in a 1996 study that “research has
demonstrated that these students, who speak the majority language of the wider society, benefit from
an immersion experience for language learning and do not suffer academically when instruction is
provided via a [second language] (p. 67). Therefore, this SIS would fall between a 70/30 to 50/50 model
Immersion Education 5
of immersion during academic instruction, based on my observations in a first grade and third grade
classroom. The dominant conversational language of this SIS is English.
Teachers at this SIS are highly qualified and are either fluent speakers of the target language or
native speakers of the target language who are fluent in English. They need to be able to present all
material in both languages, if necessary, and to be able to identify TAG students and those who may
need additional support in content areas. In the first grade classroom that I examined, there were no
students identified as special needs. There was one ELL who received ESL services twice a week for an
hour in a separate classroom and one student identified as TAG. This TAG student however was not
receiving additional support because of an administrative error. The one ELL student was fluent in
conversational English, but they were struggling with academic pursuits. Upon further inquiry, I
discovered this student was actually quite receptive, but simply did not like the way the assignments
were presented in class. This student, to my dismay, was not part of the group I was given for this
research project, so I was unable to provide extra reading support for her.
I was asked to work with five students in particular who were identified as low-level readers.
Since I believe reading to be the most important aspect of education at the primary level, I wanted to
discover the most effective ways to instruct young readers in a second language. My original plan was
to replicate the 2004 study Effects of Two Tutoring Programs on the English Reading Development of
Spanish-English Bilingual Students by Carolyn Denton, Jason Anthony, Richard Parker and Jan Hasbrouck.
This study compared two different reading programs, the Read Well and the Read Naturally programs.
However, I soon discovered that the Read Naturally program was already part of the main classroom
curriculum, so this study could not be replicated.
I chose to examine the already existing reading programs that this first grade classroom, Nacho
and Me Gusta Leer. This study did not take comprehension into consideration since comprehension
levels were found to be low during initial assessment, likely due to the fact that these students were
Immersion Education 6
reading in the target language. The purpose of this study was to discover whether or not the existing
reading programs, Nacho and Me Gusta Leer, were effective in increasing word attack and decoding
skills.
Types of Immersion and Bilingual Programs
Stephen May, Richard Hill, and Sarah Tiakiwai provided an excellent comparison of the different
immersion and bilingual language programs that are present in New Zealand in their 2004 report to the
New Zealand ministry of education. Bilingual education has a long history, with some immersion
programs actually deviating from a true bilingual program. These pseudo-programs have students who
are completely immersed in either a target language or a primary language without bilingual language
support. These models of immersion are referred to as “submersion” programs, where monolingualism
is the intent of the program. These types of programs, even ones that offer sheltered instruction, were
identified by May, Hill and Tiakiwai as “weak” bilingual education programs (p. 78). If a second language
is being used at all, it is mainly a scaffold to acquire the dominant language and then discarded later on
in the mainstream classroom, which neglects, minoritizes, and devalues the second language and
second languages’ culture.
May, Hill and Tiakiwai identified ten different types of bilingual education. The following are
considered weak models: submersion, submersion with sheltered instruction, segregationist,
transitional, mainstream with foreign language teaching, and separatist. All have the aim of either
monolingualism or relative and/or limited bilingualism. A key point to take away with these models is
that either the target language is being used to assimilate students or the target language is being
taught to separate students from the mainstream. With the final model, separatist, students are given
the choice of either being educated in the minority language or the majority language, but the
educational aim to provide autonomy to these students so they can be detached from the mainstream
(p. 78).
Immersion Education 7
The strong forms of bilingual education are the following models: immersion,
maintenance/heritage language, two-way/dual language, and mainstream bilingual. The key takeaway
with these models is that bilingualism and cultural pluralism are the educational goals of these programs
and both languages are valued. They also recognize that academic language and concepts transfer
across languages, as supported by Cummins in a 1992 report that stated, “the interdependence of
academic aspects of proficiency across languages has been used to interpret the fact that in bilingual
programs, either for minority or majority students, instruction through a minority language results in no
academic loss in the majority language.” (p. 95). The SIS studied was a 90/10 immersion program that
provided academic instruction in the target language in all core content areas up through third grade. In
the 4th and 5th grades, core content areas such as math and language arts were presented in English.
The SIS studied was, by the author’s observations, more of a 50/50 model, with academic instruction
ranging from 50% of the target language used to 90% in a given day, depending on student/teacher
affect and the difficulty of the concepts being presented.
Based on observations and initial comprehension assessments, the five readers in my reading
group comprehended very little of what they were reading from both the IDEL assessments and the
diagnostic evaluation tools offered by the Tesoros curriculum used by the SIS. It was a common
complaint shared by all three first grade teachers at the school that the diagnostic tools they were given
were inappropriate for their students. These diagnostic tools were designed for Spanish L1 students, not
English L1 students in an immersion school. It is also important to note that although the SIS was an
immersion model with academic content being presented either in the target language or bilingually,
practically all social interaction in and out of class between peers was in English. Perhaps with a higher
Spanish L1 student population this SIS could achieve a dual-language immersion model, but at present
this is not the case.
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Aspects of Effective L2 Reading Instruction
Freeman and Freeman (2000) identified twelve aspects of effective reading instruction, not
solely intended for reading instruction in a second language, but designed with second language
instruction in mind. The main points in Freeman and Freeman’s “checklist for effective reading
instruction” addressed the following: student choice and value of reading, availability of literature from
a wide array of genres, student efficiency and effectiveness during reading, proper strategy instruction
to overcome obstacles during reading, opportunities to discuss and revise understandings from reading,
and obvious influence of reading on students’ writing samples (9). These main points were the basis for
my observations in the first grade classroom in determining the effectiveness of the environment,
teaching strategies, and the reading programs.
Student choice, value of reading, and availability of literature. Beginning with the classroom
environment, I noted that there was a limited variety of books available for children to read as they
chose. Most books available were part of a curriculum, such as Tesoros, or McGraw-Hill/McMillan big
books meant to be presented during reading circles. Although there was ample time dedicated to
reading, there was not once an instance of “free reading” time with the exception of visits to the school
library. I would recommend that this class at least build a small classroom library that has books dealing
with the academic material being presented.
Students did value reading in the sense that the teacher had effectively made reading
competitive and students strived to be the best readers. Students also commented on material being
presented in thoughtful ways and were able to describe whether or not they enjoyed the reading while
connecting it to their own lives. I did notice some students at a loss when it came to selecting books at
the school library. One student asked me if they could check out one of the books I had brought from
home, and we were dismayed to find that the school library did not have the book. Another student
Immersion Education 9
was selecting reading material far too advanced for them. I would recommend generating a list of books
that the class could take to the local library.
Student efficiency and effectiveness during reading. Freeman and Freeman identified reading
efficiency as “minimal use of the [graphophonic, syntactic, and semantic] cueing systems” and student
effectiveness as “a balanced use of the three systems” (pp. 9, 24-26). It was important for me to be
careful in analyzing student’s reading ability, especially in my lower-level reading group, since these
were emergent readers who could not use the syntactic and semantic cueing systems. This is not to say
I doubted their abilities and did not expect them to be able to use these systems. I wanted to be clear in
this research study that I believed that students were not yet able to use syntactic and semantic cues
because they were reading in a second language with both minimal comprehension and unfamiliarity
with the language. However, the use of graphophonic cues was especially important to me in analyzing
word attack, since the teacher had devoted a great deal of time to phonics and decoding skills. These
graphophonic skills were obviously well used by all students in the class. There were a few students
already using all three cueing systems and self correcting when what was read either did not make sense
or sounded incorrect.
Proper strategies to overcome obstacles. Student difficulties in reading were diverse and
peculiar. There were readers who read with incredible effectiveness but retained little of what they had
just read. Others read slowly, jaggedly, but understood the meaning of the phrases they were reading.
Some became exacerbated within a few seconds of reading, while others persisted in spite of becoming
obviously frustrated. As a teacher I was asked to come up with strategies to encourage these children to
read. For the exacerbated readers I encouraged they bring some of their favorite books from home,
even if they weren’t in the target language. For the fast readers I provided them with short, single
sentence passages with pictures in a content area I thought they might enjoy. I encouraged them to tell
me what they thought about as they read the phrases.
Immersion Education 10
One student in particular read with a heavy stutter, and my initial impression was that they
were nervous being assessed. I also realized this student was working very hard to decode the
individual words. The teacher had been working with this student one-on-one, and encouraged me to
tell the student to repeat phrases as if they were talking normally, since the student only stuttered while
reading. My time at this classroom was short, only three weeks, so I was not able to determine if this
stutter was a developmental step towards more fluent reading.
Opportunities to discuss readings. Students were given an opportunity to talk about readings
at the end of every reading group. The Me Gusta Leer program, which will be discussed in detail later,
also provided worksheets that encouraged students to relate important details about the reading. I
noticed that during classroom meetings, or grand conversations, a reading wasn’t discussed among the
entire group. Library time, which also began with a reading in Spanish and a reading in English, was not
followed with a discussion of the readings. I felt that the staff at the SIS could do a better job of
following up readings with questions and relatable anecdotes to students to encourage higher-order
thinking. Also, students needed more modeling of ways to discuss readings, such as providing them
with ways to identify themes and takeaways. Often, students would veer off-topic when they were
describing the reasons they enjoyed a story.
Influence of reading on writing samples. The bulk of student writing was copied directly from
prompts the teacher would put on the projector. These exercises were very beneficial to help students
learn punctuation and format, and the teacher would provide writing samples that were directly related
to what students were reading about in the Read Naturally program. Students were also given the
opportunity to create their own writing projects that incorporated artwork. I reviewed some of their
earlier writing samples and found they were all identical. Fortunately, some of the more recent writing
samples the students had done were more creative. They had been taught during direct instruction the
beginning, middle and end formats of a short paragraph and were encouraged to create their own
Immersion Education 11
stories. The diversity in student writing was much more apparent in these writing samples, and students
were often excited to translate a difficult sentence from English to Spanish in their stories.
I noticed during my time at the SIS that the majority of writing is dictated by the grammar
translation method, where students translate their work from English into Spanish. This method creates
a peculiar form of language where it’s obvious that one is thinking in one language and translating to
another. The resulting language is therefore unnatural sounding, sometimes grammatically correct, and
usually meaningful. It is a characteristic of interlanguage, defined by George Yule as a specific form of
language that is somewhere in between two languages, sharing nothing in common with either (p. 191).
The grammar translation method also benefits from the ability to rely on language transfer, where
elements of one language are shared in common with another. A way to discourage translation in
writing is to focus more on language acquisition with students, rather than language learning, as the
communicative method calls for. This brings us to another important aspect of immersion education:
teaching methods.
Teaching Methods
Every bilingual or immersion curriculum uses one or more methods for teaching. These
methods are clearly outlined by Valdés in her 2001 book Learning and Not Learning English. Often
teachers will subscribe to a system of informed eclecticism where aspects of each method are used in
practice (p. 23). Valdés wrote, “unfortunately… the field of second-language teaching has been
characterized by the proliferation of approaches and methods… in many cases, widely heralded “new”
methods turn out to be variations on old approaches.” (p. 23). This has been a source of tension in the
SIS, with teachers complaining that the first graders in the classroom studied were not being properly
instructed in comprehension from the school-approved method. From my observations, I noted that
the teacher used a system of informed eclecticism, using each method in their own way. This is a
common practice in immersion schools, according to Gaffney, who said in a 1999 study that immersion
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teachers “rely heavily on multiple forms of delivery to communicate new concepts in the target
language, using audio, visual, and many times, kinesthetic methods to deliver the same information.” (p.
4).
Grammar translation method. The grammar translation method was initially used to teach
Latin and is still used today. It teaches rules and facts of language, and deductively teaches grammar
through the translation of texts and the study of vocabulary. (Valdés, 23). This is the method that was
common in my intermediate level Spanish classes at the University of Oregon. Verb conjugations,
grammatical rules, sentence structures and vocabulary are the bulk of the grammar translation method.
The grammar translation method is useful because, as Jim Cummins noted in 1992, “the
interdependence of academic aspects of proficiency across languages has been used to interpret the
fact that in bilingual programs, either for minority or majority students, instruction through a minority
language results in no academic loss in the majority language.” (p. 95). This suggests that academically
rich lessons, such as grammar lessons, directly transfer to both languages.
One of the difficulties of using the grammar translation method is that it requires a considerable
amount of background knowledge. The teacher at the SIS was able to incorporate difficult grammar
lessons into everyday writing activities, presented in 50/50 dual language. These lessons addressed the
use of pronouns, articles, and propositions in scripted writing activities, and students were able to
extend their writings by having one-on-one help from a teacher or aid in translating complex English
phrases to Spanish. This method was, in my opinion, presented incredibly well by the teacher at the SIS.
The audiolingual method. This method describes language at different levels (phonemic,
morphemic, syntactic, etc.) and focuses mostly on oral language. It is behaviorist in nature, with
“drilling” as the negative connotation that comes to mind. The teacher will often give a prompt, listen
to a response, and correct any mistakes. Grammar is taught inductively. Scripted dialogues and choral
responses are common practice within the audiolingual method. (Valdés, p. 23).
Immersion Education 13
I noticed this method was used throughout the school. A notable example was when school
began, a bell would toll and students would chorally recite a proper morning greeting to the teacher,
who would then ask them scripted questions about the weather that day. This happened in both the
first grade and the third grade classrooms. This method was also used throughout the day, specifically
as an attention-grabbing technique and for behavior control. It was effective in getting student
attention, and students were very engaged in audiolingual activities, especially grammar recitation
battles, between the boys and the girls.
The communicative method. This method focuses on the learning of a language mainly through
communication. It is the idea that language is acquired through use, which is the reason why highlycontextual social interaction is often learned by young students very rapidly. Simple tasks are requested
of students in the target language, and social interaction happens in the target language. (Valdés, p. 23).
Although this method is encouraged throughout the school, I noticed that the majority of social
interaction happened in English. The teacher did request simple tasks in the classroom using the target
language, and did offer greetings and salutations in the target language, but that was the extent of the
communicative method. Outside the classroom, virtually all interaction happened in English. It was
mentioned to me during a lunch break by a substitute teacher that students did not understand
anything the substitute said to them in Spanish. I believe a wider usage of the communicative approach
would help students’ comprehension a great deal, in both academic and non-academic language.
Krashen’s natural approach. Krashen (1982) developed five hypothesis that address second
language acquisition. These are the affective filter hypothesis, the input hypothesis, the natural order
hypothesis, the monitor hypothesis, and the acquisition/learning hypothesis. Taken together, teachers
should create a classroom environment that is comfortable and welcoming to students, since affect
towards learning effects ability to learn language (dubbed the affective filter). Indeed, “language
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burnout” was a common experience for me when I was learning Spanish, which had side effects like
fatigue and headaches to full blown sicknesses from stress (pp. 13-30).
Teachers should also be mindful about using language that is comprehensible for students. This
runs contrary to the audiolingual method, which suggests that mere exposure is enough to begin
learning language. Exposure must be meaningful to the learner, or little learning will be done.
Comprehensible language fashioned to the natural order of how language is learned is important
according to Krashen, because language learners seem to naturally acquire parts of speech in specific
orders. Therefore, it is beneficial to tier lessons according to which step language learners are on in the
natural order.
The monitor hypothesis cautions against overcorrecting students in their language use. It not
only takes learning away from students, but discourages them from speaking more. Children are
generally thought to acquire language faster because they are not afraid to make mistakes, therefore it
is beneficial to let students speak incorrectly during initial acquisition.
The final hypothesis draws a distinction between language learning and language acquisition.
Just like the communicative method, language acquisition is more about using language as a means to
interact and obtain what is needed. It is highly contextual, socially rich interaction that is akin to
everyday language use. Language learning is like the grammar-translation method, where grammar,
vocabulary and non-contextual input are the basis for learning language. This type of language is often
referred to as academic language. (Yule, 187).
Taken together, I observed that the SIS’s 1st grade classroom was a comfortable and welcoming
environment. Students were generally excited to be at school and were never instructed in the target
language to a point where burnout was notable. The teacher used a mix of academic language and nonacademic language in appropriate ways, and allowed students to speak while only making corrections
when it was obvious the student would benefit. Overall, I would say this classroom used a very effective
Immersion Education 15
form of eclectic instruction. As Beverly Clark noted in 1996, “being exposed to a second language is
obviously not enough; wanting to communicate with people who speak that language is crucial if
acquisition is to occur. Children who are in a second-language learning situation have to be sufficiently
motivated to start learning a new language.” (p. 185). I believe the general classroom environment was
successful in sufficiently motivating children to learn and participate in both their first and second
language.
The Nacho and Me Gusta Leer reading programs
The Nacho reading program was the preliminary reading program that the teacher had been
using in small reading groups. It consisted mainly of phonics exercises that provided sets of vowels,
phonemes, diphthongs, and consonant vowel combinations. Students would read each word part
individually with correction from the teacher, and then they would decode words that had the specific
word part within them (e.g., /oi/, /io/, boina, canario). Generally students would read through each
page together during a choral reading, then a second time individually with one-on-one teacher help.
The exercises would conclude with students tracing a sentence that included key words from the page.
There were minimal visual representations in the Nacho program.
The Me Gusta Leer reading program consisted of short paragraphs with basic sentences. An
example of a sentence, translated to English, from this program would read My sister has a cat. Her cat
is black. Her cat is named Susie. The paragraphs began as short, descriptive passages about an object,
animal or person. More advanced paragraphs would tell a sequential story. All paragraphs were
followed by a comprehension game that asked students to connect phrases with pictures depicting facts
from the story. Students were also asked to complete a fill-in-the-blank comprehension sheet after the
matching activity, which provided a word bank of key words from the passage and short sentences
similar to those found in the passage. I observed this last activity the most effective in encouraging
Immersion Education 16
students to find the answer. I simply had to give them the strategy of looking back at the paragraph and
reading for key words (See Appendix B for examples from both reading programs).
Methods
I was given five readers who were identified as the lowest level readers in the class to work
with. I was also working with other groups, but I decided to focus my assessments on these five
students to see if I could discover effective strategies to teach them reading skills. The initial assessment
I used to establish a baseline with these readers was a passage from the IDEL, or Spanish-language
version of the University of Oregon’s Dibels assessment. However, soon after completing the first round
of assessments, I decided these assessment tools were inappropriate for these readers because they
were scoring well below 60% on oral reading accuracy.
With this being the case, I struggled to find another assessment tool that would be suitable for
English speaking students who were learning Spanish as a target language. All Spanish language
assessment tools available at my disposal were designed for students with Spanish as a primary
language. I eventually decided on a diagnostic tool provided by McGraw-Hill/Macmillan’s Tesoros
curriculum and chose a passage that I found was the most appropriate for these readers. The passage
had the least amount of colloquial vocabulary and the most consistent verb forms. I used this reading
passage for a miscue analysis to establish a baseline in oral reading accuracy and to tally positive visual
graphophonic cues. I also used this exact same passage three weeks later to measure improvement in
the aforementioned domains.
Students were then pulled aside twice a week at 20 minute intervals to work on either Me Gusta
Leer or Nacho, depending on how far they had already progressed in each program. We initially worked
in small reading groups with all of the low level readers grouped together. All of the five students in my
reading group were at the end of the Nacho program at the start of this study. We began with a choral
reading, with everyone, including the teacher, reading together. Then, I would ask students to
Immersion Education 17
individually say to me each phoneme and diphthong, and then have them read to me the short passages
provided on each page in turns. I would correct student’s errors as they read to me individually as I saw
necessary. I implemented the Me Gusta Leer program in the same way as the Nacho program, first
beginning with a choral reading, then individual turn taking with teacher support. The Me Gusta Leer
program was designed in such a way that I could review student work after class to check for
comprehension, but that data is outside the scope of this paper (See appendix A for small group reading
lesson plans for both programs, and appendix B for baseline and posttest miscue analysis).
Initially, I began my reading groups the first week by grouping the lower readers into groups of
either 2 or 3 to work with them. I found this troublesome since the lower readers all had different
aspects of reading to work on, whether it was slowing down and recognizing phonemes and vowel
sounds or simply getting them to read aloud. The next week I tried incorporating the lower readers into
groups of 4 with other, higher level readers. This seemed to help them with their confidence as they
drew off of the fluency of higher reading peers, especially during choral reading.
The interventions were not applied in a strict, prescribed manner. I often would group students
according to how I felt they would be most successful, and during the last week of reading groups I
decided to keep the system I developed during the second week, by grouping higher-level readers with
lower-level readers. During the final intervention I deviated from the Me Gusta Leer program and read
from a McGraw-Hill/Macmillan Tesoros short book called El bebé elefante, which engaged students with
excellent photos and well-written comprehension questions. It was a shame that I decided to use this
reading program for the very last intervention, because I observed that students were much more
engaged and interested with this reading program.
I realized the negative effects of round robin reading, such as student listlessness and disinterest
while others were reading, and the fact that round robin reading is not a practical way of reading
outside the classroom (Freeman and Freeman, 126). So I decided to try different group combinations
Immersion Education 18
with other readers, both from the lower level group and higher reading groups to increase engagement
and interest. I found that student temperaments and their relationships with the other students were
important factors in the overall success and pace of the reading group as well as the quality of the
reading programs.
Results
Readers were found to have improved in decoding skills, as measured by oral reading accuracy,
and tested at higher rates of positive graphophonic visual cues after three weeks of small reading
groups. I tested graphophonic visual cues because I believe this measure to be directly related to word
attack, especially when comprehension of what is read is low. Figures A shows baseline and posttest
scores for oral reading accuracy, and figure B shows positive graphophonic visual cues.
Figure A. Oral Reading Fluency Scores
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Figure B. Positive Visual Graphonic Cues
The improvement in oral reading accuracy was notable for all readers. However, the increase in
positive visual graphophonic cues was minimal, with all readers having scored at least 85% during
baseline assessment. Visual graphophonic cues are specifically used to measure the level that students
are attempting to read for meaning, and have to be taken in whole with all other three cueing systems
to determine if readers are reading for meaning (Department for education and skills, p. 4). In this case,
this data merely shows us how effectively students are recognizing words visually, so I applied this data
to measure word attack.
The data show that both reading programs had a positive impact on student’s ability to decode
words. It would be a stretch to say that either reading program had an effect on word attack skills as
measured by positive graphophonic visual cues, because gains were minimal due to a high baseline
assessment.
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Discussion
Discussion and Conclusions
To address my question of whether or not the Nacho and Me Gusta Leer reading programs were
effective in increasing decoding skills and word attack, I feel that the two measurements, oral reading
accuracy and positive visual graphophonic cues, only address part of the entire picture. I observed
students reading well and making minor errors in pronunciation, as is to be expected while learning a
second language. I observed students retaining information they had learned the day before from the
Nacho program, especially in regards to decoding words by applying phonemes, and this shows in the
oral reading accuracy scores.
This study was difficult to complete because of the lack of research in effective reading
programs in immersion education. Student affect towards another language was observed to be
somewhat apathetic, as Spanish was viewed by the students as the academic language of the school,
and therefore, not the language to be really worked with, socially and artistically. In this regard, it may
be an excellent idea to introduce poetry to younger readers, as Jez Walruth did in her 2014 study
Culturally Authentic Curriculum in Foreign Language Education. A culturally authentic curriculum might
serve as a basis for taking Spanish as a second language and allowing students to mold it to their own
classroom culture.
I was not surprised to find that students improved in both measurements by the end of the
study. The question that remained lingering after the study was, now that students are improving in
decoding skills, what would the best next step be in comprehending the text in front of them? I felt that
the McGraw-Hill/Macmillan reading program not included in this study was an excellent next step to
move from decoding and word attack to comprehension for various reasons. One of the most basic, and
perhaps important, was the quality of the McGraw-Hill/Macmillan booklets available to all readers.
Immersion Education 21
They were not photocopied dittoes of a single reading program like Nacho and Me Gusta Leer, and had
high quality photographs and themes that were more familiar to students.
This led me to an important finding, which is discussed by Freeman and Freeman when one is
considering the aspects of effective reading instruction: the quality of the literature used and its
availability are important for emergent readers. If the themes presented are relevant to, say, Columbian
students in a first grade class but not first graders at a SIS in Oregon, are students going to be engaged in
the readings? How are students able to connect background knowledge to readings that have little to
do with their lives?
Limitations of the study
First and foremost, I feel it would beneficial to separate the Nacho and Me Gusta Leer reading
programs and then conduct a comparative study examining the advantages and disadvantages between
different phonics-centered programs and different comprehension-centered programs. However, the
bulk of research suggests that the two types of programs combined are the most effective, thus calling
to question the ethicality of such a study. It is also necessary to conduct a study that uses oral reading
fluency as a measure, thus calling into question the quality of assessments used in this study.
Assessments used were too advanced for Spanish immersion students. A more appropriate
Spanish language assessment tool should be developed for immersion students, since available
assessments were designed for primarily Spanish-language students. The availability of proper
assessments made it difficult to measure oral reading fluency, since students in the lower-level reading
group could only read roughly thirty words a minute from the assessments. I feel a better gauged
assessment would be able to pinpoint reading delays much more effectively, since assessors would be
able to measure all three cueing systems and begin taking account comprehension during reading, and
not just reading accuracy and word attack.
Immersion Education 22
This study was also not implemented with fidelity, since students were not kept in the same
reading groups throughout intervention. I felt that student success was more important than fidelity for
this study, and thus grouped students by affect and relation to peers, as well as response to higher level
readers, to ensure their engagement and participation.
Costs of the programs were also not brought into question, but it was assumed that both the
Nacho and Me Gusta Leer reading programs were cost effective since they were photocopied. However,
this may not be the case since it may be cheaper in the long run to buy quality texts that are used year
after year.
Implications for Teaching
The use of miscue analysis is important in determining a reader’s ability to effectively decode.
Therefore, it is beneficial for teachers, especially with emergent readers, to gather miscue analysis data
on readers to determine the level of texts to be presented to them and to identify areas of strength and
weakness.
These readers were found to be effectively decoding, and these programs were increasing their
abilities to effectively decode. When students are reading at 94-97% accuracy, they are considered to
be reading at “instructional level” which aids the teacher in selecting texts that would be most
appropriate in developing comprehension, especially with students learning a second or foreign
language. Selecting an appropriate text also depends on oral reading fluency, with beginning passages
consisting of around 100 words. (Department for education and skills, p. 4)
Implications for Further Inquiry
More research needs to be devoted to effective reading instruction in all models of immersion
education. The first step to identifying effective reading programs would be to design appropriate
assessment tools for emergent immersion readers. This needs to be a collaborative effort between
Immersion Education 23
native speakers and non-native speakers that agree on the important points of language that should be
learned by elementary aged students.
Immersion Education 24
References
Anthony, J.L., Denton, C.A., Hasbrouck, J.E., Parker, R. (2004). Effects of Two Tutoring Programs on the
English Reading Development of Spanish-English Bilingual Students. The Elementary School
Journal, 104(4), 289-305.
Cummins, J. (1992). Bilingual education and English immersion. Bilingual Research Journal, 16(1&2), 94.
Christian, D. (1996). Two-way immersion education: Students learning through two languages. Modern
Language Journal, 80(1), (66-76).
Clark, B. A. (2000). First-and second-language acquisition in early childhood. In Issues in early childhood
education: Curriculum, teacher education, & dissemination of information. Proceedings of the
Lilian Katz Symposium (pp. 5-7).
Department for education and skills. Miscue analysis. Retrieved from
http://rwp.excellencegateway.org.uk/resource/Diagnostic+assessment%3A+literacy%3A+materi
als+for+assessing+reading+using+miscue+analysis/pdf/. (p. 4).
Freeman, D., Freeman, Y. (2000). Teaching reading in multilingual classrooms. Portsmouth, New
Hampshire: Heinemann.
Gaffney, K. (1999). Is immersion education appropriate for all students? ACIE Newsletter. Indianapolis,
IN.
Greatschools. (2014). Buena vista elementary school: student ethnicity. Retrieved from
http://www.greatschools.org/oregon/eugene/438-Buena-Vista-ElementarySchool/?tab=demographics.
Head Start database (2014). Dual language learner enrollment by site [Data file]. Retrieved from
https://webcaf.hsolc.org/ (secure database).
Krashen, S. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition (pp. 13-30). Pergamon: Oxford.
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S. May, R. Hill, S. Tiakiwai (2004). Bilingual / immersion education: indicators of good practice. New
Zealand: Wilf Malcom institute of educational research, University of Waikato
Valdés, G. (2001). Learning and not learning English: Latino students in American schools. New York, NY:
Teachers College Press.
Walruth, J. (2014). Culturally authentic curriculum in foreign language education [PowerPoint slides].
Retrieved from
https://docs.google.com/a/pacificu.edu/presentation/d/1EChqZ0nRcO7iXw2jEA_0fMBfMt97s3ASw50BJDMwkI/edit#slide=id.p
Yule, G. (2010). The study of language. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.