UCLA

There are approximately 1.3 million Emergent Bilingual students (EB students) in California's public schools (CDE, 2017). The current study examines the relationship between the language ideologies and academic achievement of 18 Spanish-English EB students at a public elementary school in Los Angeles. Language ideologies are "sets of beliefs (or ideas) about language" (Ajsic & McGroarty, 2015, p. 182). One-on-one interviews with EB students revealed that EB students embraced a bilingual language ideology through their bilingual language practices at home and at school and their preference for bilingual instruction. EB students in bilingual classrooms, on average, performed higher on both English and Spanish assessments than EB students in English-only classrooms and often also performed above the national norm in both English and Spanish. There was a positive relationship between bilingual language ideologies and high academic achievement for students in bilingual classrooms. This relationship was not evident for students in English-only classrooms.