Two-Way Bilingual Instruction of Third Language Children: Immersion or Submersion?

Two-way immersion, where language majority and language minority children develop bilingualism together, has grown phenomenally in the U.S, even while traditional bilingual education comes increasingly under attack in the current political climate. Two-way immersion is much less threatening to critics who resent having to support special programs for language minority children and who fear that traditional bilingual education improperly fosters ethnic pride. Such critics more willingly tolerate two-way immersion because it benefits language majority children (Crawford, 1999). This tolerance, combined with very strong parent support for two-way programs, has permitted two-way immersion programs to continue and grow where other bilingual programs have been disallowed. Parent support has been key, particularly support from English-speaking parents, because these parents have seized on the value of bilingualism for their children and have the political clout to push for language instruction in public schools. Occasionally, language majority children, who already speak the socially dominant language (SDL), can be found successfully learning two or more languages in school, such as in Luxembourg (Luxembourgish L1 German L2, French L3) and in Canada (English L1, Hebrew and French Lx/Ly). Language minority children who do not speak the SDL when they begin school may face third and fourth language instruction, typically with less successful outcomes. When language minority children must learn an SDL in order to function at the most basic level in school, they are subject to submersion damage (HernándezChávez, 1984), and may be at greater risk if there are two or more languages that are socially dominant in a community (Rolstad, 1997). Submersion damage entails psychological and social effects which can be debilitating to students (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1981). A Turkish child in Luxembourg, for example, is vulnerable to a hierarchy of social judgments in the community which ranks Luxembourgish, German and French relative to each other but all higher than Turkish. These social judgments stand to harm the child’s self-esteem and ethnic identification. Though still relatively rare, third language (L3) instruction is affecting ever-greater numbers of language minority children in Europe, Canada and the U.S, especially if one includes bidialectalism under the umbrella of bilingualism. While L3 instruction could conceivably lead to multilingualism, such instruction may come at a high psychosocial cost if it engenders alienation in the way that submersion does. To explore the question of whether language minority children are likely to benefit from L3 instruction or to suffer from submersion, I begin by reviewing research of the effects of submersion on self-concept and ethnic identification and submersion’s role in underachievement. I discuss two-way immersion and how it may correspond to immersion, rather than submersion, for L3 children, followed with a discussion of the literature on how L3 instruction affects self-concept and ethnic identification. I then present the design for the current case study of the psychosocial effects of two-way immersion on L3 children, followed by the findings from the study. I