Is Bilingual Education Sustainable?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The abstract needs to be revised to provide a summary of the results of the research reported in the article.

Author Response

Thank for the comment. We revised the abstract as required.

Reviewer 2 Report

Once again, I am deeply grateful to the editors of Sustainability for their confidence in my activities as a reviewer. Now focused on the review of the paper "Is bilingual education sustainable? (sustainability-1446580), first of all, I must congratulate the authors for their work. Of course, they demonstrate a very broad knowledge of the subject they dissect.

Next, I would like to indicate a series of changes and/or suggestions for improvement: in order to improve this work and, therefore, with a view to its acceptance. Please carry out each and every one of the changes indicated:

1. I believe that the paper should be contextualized somewhat better. I say this in the following sense: not everybody is familiar with the Italian school system, as it is structured by grades according to the age of its students. In the same way, I consider that not everyone knows a priori what the nomenclature L1 vs. L2 means. Therefore, I suggest that you remove them from the abstract and that in the methodological part you include a small table or even a graph, in which you outline the functioning of the italian school system and remind the explicit meaning of the terms L1 and L2.

 

2. Please, in the introduction I suggest you do not speak in terms of your own expectations but in terms of the hypotheses you intend to test. In fact, eliminate all the subsections you include in the introduction. I think you should include a brief "literature review" or "state of the art". Therefore, reduce the size of the introduction by establishing a not very extensive exposition of the subject you are analyzing, what your objectives are, and if these have materialized as a result of your research.

 

3. Do not forget to indicate, at the end of the introduction, a brief final paragraph summarizing what content is covered in each of the sections that make up this paper.

 

4. Please move lines 192-193 to the methodological part.

 

5. You may indicate the name of the institutions where the research was conducted: I refer to lines 206-207. If this is not allowed, please make a note of this fact.
6. What exactly is the Yark test? Can you give a prior definition and/or cite where it comes from? At least I have not been able to find it.
7. "Post hoc" in cursive. Please change it.

 

8. Please, with the information contained in table 1, make a figure and then, please include a table with the most important descriptive statistics.

 

9. Please remove the footnotes and include their content in the main body of the text.

 

10. Please eliminate each subsection in the discussions. There is no need for such a level of exhaustiveness.

 

11. I loved the conclusions! But it would be pertinent for you to indicate what practical policies could be pursued based on your work, what lines of theoretical research can be undertaken based on it, and what limitations have been encountered in this research that might hinder further research of this nature.

 

With best wishes in your personal and academic life,

 

The reviewer

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for the comments that make us focus on some redundancies and lead us to formulate differently some concepts. We have taken into account most of the comments. In some cases, we had different thoughts than the reviewer and did not make the suggested changes, also in the light of the facts, no concerns were raised by the other two reviewers. Below the detailed answers are provided.

Next, I would like to indicate a series of changes and/or suggestions for improvement: in order to improve this work and, therefore, with a view to its acceptance. Please carry out each and every one of the changes indicated:

1. I believe that the paper should be contextualized somewhat better. I say this in the following sense: not everybody is familiar with the Italian school system, as it is structured by grades according to the age of its students. In the same way, I consider that not everyone knows a priori what the nomenclature L1 vs. L2 means. Therefore, I suggest that you remove them from the abstract and that in the methodological part you include a small table or even a graph, in which you outline the functioning of the Italian school system and remind the explicit meaning of the terms L1 and L2.

 

We removed L1 and L2 from the abstract. We used it in the introduction, but we introduced the acronyms at the beginning of it.

                                                                 

1. Please, in the introduction I suggest you do not speak in terms of your own expectations but in terms of the hypotheses you intend to test. In fact, eliminate all the subsections you include in the introduction. I think you should include a brief "literature review" or "state of the art". Therefore, reduce the size of the introduction by establishing a not very extensive exposition of the subject you are analyzing, what your objectives are, and if these have materialized as a result of your research.

We removed the aim and hypothesis from the introduction and left the literature review. We eliminated some redundancies and stated our objectives at the end but have not reported the results because it does not seem appropriate in the introduction.

We reorganized the section that follows and titled it “The present study”

1. Do not forget to indicate, at the end of the introduction, a brief final paragraph summarizing what content is covered in each of the sections that make up this paper.

            Done

1. Please move lines 192-193 to the methodological part.

As said earlier, we reorganized this section. 

1. You may indicate the name of the institutions where the research was conducted: I refer to lines 206-207. If this is not allowed, please make a note of this fact.

 

I usually do not see the name of the institutions indicated in papers, and I do not think that this has to be notified.

 

1. What exactly is the Yark test? Can you give a prior definition and/or cite where it comes from? At least I have not been able to find it.

 

We rephrased it as follow: “York Assessment of Reading Comprehension Passage Reading (YARC;[30]) evaluate the reading skills of children between 5 and 11 years. It measures reading rate (measured in seconds), accuracy, and comprehension.”

The citation was already included (30).

 

1. "Post hoc" in cursive. Please change it.

Done

 

1. Please, with the information contained in table 1, make a figure and then, please include a table with the most important descriptive statistics.

It is not clear to me which kind of figure we should provide. In general, these pieces of information are included in a table, as they are now. As none of the two other reviewers raised concerns, we leaved as it is.

1. Please remove the footnotes and include their content in the main body of the text.

 

We think that it is better to leave in a footnote in the interest of fluency.

 

1. Please eliminate each subsection in the discussions. There is no need for such a level of exhaustiveness.

We think that subsections help the reader to focus on our research questions. This is a style often used and we prefer to adopt it.

1. I loved the conclusions! But it would be pertinent for you to indicate what practical policies could be pursued based on your work, what lines of theoretical research can be undertaken based on it, and what limitations have been encountered in this research that might hinder further research of this nature.

 

We added some thoughts in the discussion.

 

In conclusion, our results indicate that acquiring literacy simultaneously in two languages does not negatively affect literacy in the native language. Educational policy should take this into account and promote early literacy and early exposure to an L2 oral language. This study involved children exposed to English by age 3; a possible extension is to investigate a bilingual educational system, where English is learned at a later age both in oral and written form. A further development would be to carry out a longitudinal study, although this may be practically very hard to do, as it requires to collect data over 5 years.

 

 

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors skillfully tackled the topic of bilingual education, presented the hypotheses and the results clearly, and meaningfully synthesized and integrated them in the existing literature. The study is particularly relevant and could prove extremely useful in several fields of research in the future: multilingualism, second language acquisition, plurilingualism.

Author Response

We appreciate the time the reviewer  spent reading our article and we thank him/her.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Regarding the revised version of the article: "Is bilingual education sustainable? (sustainability-1446580), I have to tell you that, at least for my part, it should be accepted and consequently published. Obviously, the authors have rewritten their work based on the suggestions and proposals for improvement that this reviewer provided, so it is not worth waiting any longer to see it accepted on my part. With my best wishes in your personal and academic life,

The reviewer