The rapidity with which immigrant children learn the dominant language of their
country of residence has important short-term and long-term consequences for
their educational achievements and for their future. In this paper I use US
Census data to model trajectories of English acquisition among foreign-born
children living in Spanish-language households. The results show, as expected,
that children's English proficiency increases with length of residence in the
United States. However, the results also show a clear trend by age at arrival.
The older children are when they arrive in the United States, the less rapid
their progress in acquiring proficiency in English.
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