The vast majority of the children attending this school come from monolingual English-speaking families, and the school is located in an area that is not near a Spanish speaking community so the children who attend this school generally do not have opportunities to speak Spanish outside the school. All curricular instruction, including reading and language arts, is in Spanish in kinder-garten and first grade. English is introduced for the first time in second grade when English language arts are taught for a half hour a day. The amount of time devoted to English reading and language arts increases gradually. Fifth grade is the end of elementary education at this immersion site.
Teachers are bilingual, either native speakers of Spanish or English.
The same teachers teach both the Spanish and the English curricula from second grade onwards. They were ten years old at the beginning of the school year. The three children came from households in which English was the native language and did not have Spanish-speaking ancestry. They had siblings who either had attended or were attending the school at the time of the study. The children were planning to attend the middle school Spanish maintenance program after they graduated from this school.