Last week, New York City School Chancellor Carmen Fariña announced that the city will expand its dual language offerings, making no less than 40 such programs available to K-12 students. According to the New York Times, the programs will primarily aim to get students reading, writing, and talking proficiently in both English and Spanish, with additional offerings available in Japanese, Hebrew, Chinese, French, and Haitian-Creole.

These additions, set for the 2015-16 school year, are in line with the shifting attitudes toward bilingual education. For example, in California, voters may get the option in 2016 to annul Proposition 227, a 1998 bill which required schools to only teach in English, effectively banning bilingual education.

Bans on bilingual education grew in part out of fear that immigrant students would not learn English if given the option to continue speaking in their native language —​ an argument shot down by Yale University linguistic professor Claire Bowern, who recently penned an essay where she set out to dispel that notion with evidence that children of immigrants become fluent in a country's major language within a generation. Bowern additionally argued that bilingual education is beneficial for all students, not just the affluent.

Growing evidence also shows that learning more than one language can be an asset to developmental growth and attention spans. Researchers at York University in Toronto recently published a study finding that learning to juggle two languages in your mind actually strengthens the brain's functions and improves attention.

With states becoming more open to bilingual education, how can schools easily adapt? Luckily, a number of online resources exist to help boost language learning in the classroom.

Early Lingo Total Immersion Bundle

This bundle of four apps teaching four languages (French, English, Italian, and Spanish) costs $2.99 in the iTunes App Store. Early Lingo introduces students to two characters, Jojo and Lulu, as they go on adventures in the park and on the farm. In these various locations, students are pushed to learn language through interactive games.

According to iTunes, the main topics of the games are colors, shapes, numbers, animals, park, and farm. While this may seem a bit rudimentary, it's a good starting point for getting students' feet wet and starting to familiarize them with a new language. The program also utilizes the total immersion method, so there's no translation — students are immediately pushed into the world of a new language and asked to use context clues to understand what is happening while deciphering new, unfamiliar vocabulary.