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A two-way immersion (TWI) program is one example of a bilingual education program model that aims to develop communicative competence for social and academic (school) settings in two or more languages. TWI programs exemplify an additive and integrated approach to bilingual education. The goal is to add another language to the students' home language(s), not to replace the home language with another language (i.e., the societal dominant language). A unique feature of TWI programs is their enrollment of speakers of the majority (societal, high-status) language and a minority (low-status) language. All students are educated together for most or all of the day and receive content and literacy instruction through both the majority and the minority language. By integrating minority and majority students and by taking an additive bilingual perspective, an important agenda for TWI programs is to replace the discourse of deficit and marginalization that has characterized much of language minority schooling policies and practices with alternative discourses that value these students' home languages and cultural experiences and that stress bilingualism and cross-cultural competence as a resource for the individual, the community, and the nation.

General Background

TWI programs share three essential features (Howard, Sugarman, & Christian, 2003; Howard, Sugarman, Christian, Lindholm-Leary, & Rogers, 2007).

  • TWI programs are considered enrichment programs that aim at three interrelated goals: high levels of bilingualism and biliteracy, grade-level academic achievement, and cross-cultural competence.
  • TWI programs enroll approximately equal numbers of native speakers of English and native speakers of the minority language, and integrate these two groups of students for most or all of the day.
  • All TWI students receive content area instruction and literacy instruction through both languages.

In the United States, the first TWI programs were implemented in Miami-Dade County, Florida, in response to the rapid influx of Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro's regime in the early 1960s. In 1963, the first TWI school was established at Coral Way Elementary School. Early research on TWI by leading experts in immersion and bilingual education through the federally funded Center for Language Education and Research (1985–1989) led to the establishment of a number of new programs and increased awareness and interest in the model. By the late 1980s, 30 programs were identified nationwide, spanning seven states and the District of Columbia. According to a national database maintained by the Center for Applied Linguistics, there are currently over 300 TWI programs in the United States (a directory is available at http://www.cal.org/twi/directory). Today, the great majority of TWI programs use Spanish and English as instructional languages (93%), although Arabic, French, Korean, Mandarin, and Portuguese are also used in a few programs. Further, most TWI programs (79%) are implemented at the elementary (kindergarten through Grade 5) level; it has been difficult to continue or begin programs at the secondary level. While the focus in this entry is on TWI programs in the United States, TWI programs can also be found elsewhere. For example, Budach (2008) provides overviews of specific TWI programs implemented in Germany, and Bekerman (2005) describes a Hebrew-Arabic TWI program in Israel.

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