As a Canadian and a product of globally emulated French immersion education, I experienced the benefits of immersion education when I immigrated to Canada from Iran at age 9.

French immersion is the Canadian counterpart of dual-language programs in the United States—they both allow speakers of the majority language to learn a second language. For example, U.S. dual-language programs for English- and Spanish-speakers provide instruction in English and Spanish for equal parts of the day. Dual-language programs were developed in the U.S. in the late 1960s, inspired by the theoretical framework of the Canadian French immersion program.

I arrived in Canada not speaking or understanding any English. Given my strong literacy skills and content knowledge in Persian and French, using French to learn English was very successful. Researchers have demonstrated that the ability to read transfers across languages, even when the writing systems are different: from Chinese to English, from Vietnamese to English, from Japanese to English, and from Turkish to Dutch (see sources).

As an SLP and mother, I used my own experiences and my academic knowledge to teach my daughter to read Persian using her literacy skills in English. She began reading at a first-grade level in Persian in less than three months, a process that likely would have taken longer had I not used her stronger language—English in this case—to teach Persian.

As a researcher, I have been fortunate to observe one of the most successful bilingual programs for Spanish-speaking preschoolers in New Jersey. Preschoolers in this program—many from single-parent homes and living in poverty—start at 3 years old and speak only Spanish. They are immersed in a dual-language classroom with two teachers, a native English-speaker and a native Spanish-speaker. By the age of 5, most of these Spanish-speaking preschoolers have achieved fluency in English, despite little to no exposure to English at home.

—Mahchid Namazi

I was born and raised in Kuwait, an Arabic-speaking country. I grew up a simultaneous bilingual of Asian-Indian ethnicity, with family members speaking Hindi and English at home. I was exposed to Arabic as the dominant language spoken, and incidentally began to acquire Arabic vocabulary, greetings and songs. In elementary school, all students were expected to speak, read and write Arabic. By this time, my parents—who had emigrated from India—were fluent in Arabic, learned in university classes with employer support. When I began learning Arabic in grade school, I was fluent in English, and bilingual teachers (with native fluency in Arabic) used my knowledge of English to expedite my learning of Arabic using dual-language materials.

I quickly acquired basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS in Cummins’ model): I could have social conversations, order meals at a restaurant, talk on the phone and express many basic needs. As I continued to learn Arabic, I learned to read and write it as well, but speaking seemed stymied for some time at the BICS level, requiring more time and effort to develop further (as predicted by Cummins).

My subsequent moves from Kuwait to India, and from India to the United States, nearly eroded my Arabic, with significant attrition of my spoken ability and less attrition of my reading and writing ability. Several factors set the stage for this attrition. I had acquired spoken Arabic only a little beyond the BICS level; my subsequent moves to different countries diminished the contextual value and appreciation for my Arabic skills, given the absence of social or vocational situations in which knowing Arabic was advantageous; and, without conversational partners or members of my social network fluent in Arabic, the motivation to use and maintain it faded.

I decided to raise my sons as English-Hindi bilinguals based on an instinctive desire not to lose my heritage language or a home environment that promotes it. I have observed clearly that cognitive and social skills acquired in English transfer readily to Hindi and vice versa. Further, English is used routinely in Hindi classes as the conduit to facilitate rapid acquisition of spoken and written Hindi, clearly supporting the Common Underlying Proficiencies model in which the heritage language strongly facilitates second-language acquisition. These personal experiences with language attrition and facilitating second language acquisition have deeply inspired my teaching, research and clinical practice in this area.

—Nidhi Mahendra