Elementary and Secondary ESL programs within BC

Hey Hiram,

This is a very interesting idea and one worth exploring more. I am unsure exactly of what we're trying to measure here. What is meant by the term "settlement"? Reading through again, essentially you've merged two research questions into one in (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong): "are ESL programs more effective in teaching English to kids at younger ages" and "does learning English affect job opportunities and/or opportunities in post-secondary education for new immigrants?" These are both good questions, and the latter obviously holds a considerable amount of weight in political discourse.

However, with only five survey questions to ask it will be very difficult to get a good idea of whether one or either of these are true. In order to ensure that our survey maximizes external validity it seems like we'd need to also include a sample of individuals who hadn't taken ESL, to compare the effectiveness of it as a medium to teach English to people. This gets us off-track a bit and is probably more fit for experimental studies.

Rather than focus on ESL as a medium, I would focus simply on the time in which new immigrants learned English. This may seem counter-intuitive: since all we've discussed so far is specifying and narrowing things down, but in this case if we focus on the mediums through which people learn English we're going to be expanding the potential for unwanted confounds and reducing the precious amount space we need to formulate questions. So again, rather than ESL, I would suggest we use age that the respondent remembers learning English. It would be important then to find out:

- Whether they already spoke English - If not, what age did they learn English (rather than using numbers, perhaps we can sacrifice some external validity for parsimony and use intervals of 6-7 years i.e. 1-7, 8-14, 15-21, etc.).

After that, we'd want to also narrow the focus down to either job opportunity or post-secondary education. Measuring the latter is much easier since degrees are a tangible thing we can point to, so perhaps we should go with that.

I'd like to hear your thoughts though. I know I'm quite picky so feel free to rip me apart too- criticism is I think, the best way we can develop these questions and come up with an effective study even given our operating constraints.