The Promise and Realities of Two-Way Instruction

Vignette: A Moment of Success and a Moment of Failure

It is a sunny spring morning in Senora Soto's Kindergarten classroom and I am sitting cross-legged on the floor, notebook in hand, trying to extract meaningful field notes from the din and chaos of children playing together in the Housekeeping and Blocks Centers. It is official Spanish time, the time of day when children, regardless of whether they speak Spanish or English at home, are expected to speak with the teacher and with each other only in Spanish. This rule is strictly enforced by Sra. Soto, who is a native Spanish speaker herself and committed to the goals of this two-way immersion (TWI) Kindergarten as she sees them: to make sure English speakers learn Spanish, to make sure Spanish speakers learn English without losing the language their families brought to the USA, and to make sure all children value Spanish and those who speak it. In the mornings, she is Sra. Soto and we speak Spanish, in the afternoons we speak English with her English-speaking alter ego, Mrs. Soto.

I can barely hear Sra. Soto chatting with a small group of children who are working on a puzzle at a table on the other side of the classroom. They are speaking in Spanish, for the most part. I'm impressed, since some of these children only speak English at home. Another boy, despite being a native Spanish speaker, had categorically refused at the start of the year to speak Spanish in this classroom. Laughter erupts from the table; obviously, they are having fun. I realize I have been distracted from documenting the mostly English interactions going on in the Housekeeping Center.

Rashid, an African-American child who has been learning Spanish in this TWI classroom for about seven months now, approaches me and whispers in English, 'Why was Sra. Soto laughing?' Still trying to regain concentration on the nearby Housekeeping play, I shake my head and shrug my shoulders. Then, forgetting myself, I respond to his English question with my own, equally transgressive, English question, 'Why are you speaking to me in English?' Rashid replies, still whispering, 'Because I don't know Spanish'. When I glance (involuntarily?) over at Sra. Soto, Rashid seems to interpret this as a plan to turn him in. He smiles slyly, cocking his head to one side and touching my arm. He says, still in English, 'No no no. Don't tell her. I was only tricking you'. He walks off, looking back at me and still smiling.

This brief vignette illustrates some of the promise but also the reality of trying to teach a minority language such as Spanish in the USA. Over the course of the first seven months of this brand-new Spanish-English TWI Kindergarten program, Sra. Soto was able to help some English-speaking children learn some basic Spanish. She managed to convince some reluctant Spanish speakers to keep speaking the home language that they shared with her in the face of enormous social pressure to speak English, and only English, in this country (Alba, 2007; Suarez, 2002; Wong-Fillmore, 1991). Furthermore, the classroom had a generally friendly and lively atmosphere: children played together with dolls in the Housekeeping Center, they laughed together with the teacher as they put together a puzzle. Overall, this classroom seemed a cheerful, welcoming place. Sra. Soto was strict at times, and was also a warm, caring and imaginative teacher.

Nevertheless, the vignette also illustrates the realities that make TWI teaching a particular challenge. Rashid and I, both native English speakers, knowingly violated the important official Spanish time rule. Both of us were able to speak Spanish, although neither of us was an especially confident speaker at the time. We were probably both up to the challenge of expressing our simple questions in comprehensible Spanish, but we didn't. And we both clearly understood that Spanish was to be spoken, since the division of the day into official Spanish time (mornings) and official English time (afternoons) had been clearly and consistently signaled and enforced since the beginning of the school year in September. We had both witnessed Sra. Soto painstakingly explaining something with repetitions, gestures and pantomime to a child rather than using the child's stronger language, and we had both witnessed children carefully and awkwardly stringing together two or three Spanish words rather than resort to fluent English. Rashid himself had done that. Yet, there was something about two people who share fluency in the same language, safe in the knowledge that we were momentarily alone, that nudged us into speaking English during Spanish time.

Looking back on this vignette, actually, I am appalled. I had chosen to conduct this study because I strongly advocate programs designed to develop and maintain heritage languages like Spanish in the USA, and my own experience of learning Spanish only served to support my conviction that language development requires persistent use of the target language. I find my momentary collusion with Rashid to undermine the classroom 'Spanish-only' rule, a rule I advocated myself, distressing. What was behind this lapse, was it familiarity, laziness, distraction, self-consciousness, a reluctance to code-switch, some peculiar English-speaker solidarity or maybe a little of each? Whatever moved Rashid and me at the time, I am pretty sure these same forces and more were constantly at work in this classroom against the use of Spanish. My observations throughout the school year also made me notice something I had not anticipated: children's interactions often did not require any language at all. Over and over, I witnessed children share classroom tasks and play together happily without saying much at all, and the activity unfolded perfectly well without the linguistic interactions so fundamental to the TWI model.

This book, then, is a critical analysis of the TWI model. It is critical in the sense that I closely examine and interrogate some assumptions about language learning and classroom design that underpin the model. Nevertheless, this is meant to be a constructive criticism. I support these programs wholeheartedly and hope they continue to proliferate in the USA and internationally. There is plenty of evidence that they are effective; overall, children do learn English and another language, usually Spanish, while continuing to achieve academically (Collier & Thomas, 2004; E.R. Howard et al., 2003a; Lindholm-Leary, 2005; Lindholm-Leary & Borsato, 2002). Yet, I believe we need to understand better how they work. My goal is to provide some insights that will help improve TWI instruction. Using an extended...