Critiques two theories dominating bilingual education. The facilitation hypothesis predicts long-term advantage for bilingual education over all-English instruction. The time-on-task hypothesis predicts that all-English instruction is superior to bilingual education in teaching English. Argues that bilingual programs may facilitate English…

A few Structured English Immersion programs have been developed and tested in the past two decades. The experience of these programs, especially Seattle's, can provide much-needed guidance to California's schools and reformers of bilingual programs. Although not necessarily an all-English program, SEI employs the original language less extensively…

The design of California's Structured English Immersion (SEI) program for limited-English-speaking students, which replaced its bilingual education program by state mandate, is described and suggestions for implementation are offered. SEI has several variations, each characterized by (1) extensive use of English and (2) use of…