UC Irvine

There is a strong interest in the educational outcome of language minority students in the United  States, but the majority of research on these students’ educational attainments has focused on one subgroup: those language minority students with limited English proficiency. Much less is known about language minority students who are classified as fully English proficient, either initially (at school entry) or after some period of bilingual or English-as-a-second-language (ESL) education at school. Language minority students qualify as fully English proficient based on test scores, but may still show somewhat different patterns of skills and weaknesses to those of English-only (EO) classmates in mainstream classrooms. This paper examines different performance profiles of students within the language minority population and investigates whether they respond similarly or differently to an academic vocabulary intervention, Word Generation.