I think there is a tendency to confuse ESL with bilingual education. ESL is simply teaching English to people who don't speak it. ESL usually uses English only in its teaching. You don't have to be bilingual to teach ESL, most teachers aren't. What CC is referring to is to bilingual ed. which uses the student's native language to teach other subjects while the student learns English. I heard some students are not enrolled in English classes until some time has gone by. I am not familiar enough with it, but I am familiar with ESL. All inmigrants to the US took English classes. It's just that today those classes for non-English speaking persons are called English as a Second Language, simply because those people already speak another language as their mother tongue. If you are learning Spanish in the DR and you are monolingual, then you are taking Spanish as a second language. If you are already fluent in English an French, for example, then Spanish would be your third language. In your case you would be learning Spanish as a third language. Get my point?
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