NEW YORK >> On one of the first days of class at Dos Puentes Elementary School in Manhattan last month, a new student named Michelle peered up through pale blue glasses and took a deep breath.

"Can I drink water?" Michelle, 6, said.

"Diga en Espanol," her first-grade teacher, Rebeca Madrigal, answered.

Michelle paused.

"Can I drink agua?" she replied.

It was a start.

Dos Puentes, a three-year-old school in the Washington Heights neighborhood, is a dual-language program, which means that subjects, like reading and math, are taught in two languages with the goal of making students bilingual. Once seen as a novelty, dual-language programs are now coming into favor as a boon to both native and nonnative English speakers, and in areas around the country their numbers have been exploding.

In New York City, there were 39 new or expanded dual-language programs this year, in addition to an increase of about 25 programs two years ago. Languages offered now include Arabic, Chinese, French, Haitian-Creole, Hebrew, Korean, Polish and Russian, as well as dozens that teach in Spanish.

In Utah, 9 percent of the state’s public elementary students are enrolled in dual-language programs. In Portland, Oregon, 10 percent of all students, and nearly 1 in 5 kindergartners, participate. Statewide efforts to increase the number of programs, and expand access to them, are underway in states such as Delaware and North Carolina.

Libia Gil, assistant deputy secretary and director of the office of English language acquisition at the U.S. Education Department, said that while there was no definitive count of dual-language programs nationwide, "there are clear indications of a movement."

In some localities, like New York City, the primary goal of expanding dual-language programs is to increase access to them for English-language learners, officials at the city’s Education Department said.

Traditionally, these children were taught almost exclusively in English. But a growing body of research suggests that while these students can take more time to get on grade level in a dual-language program, by late elementary or middle school they tend to perform as well as or better academically than their peers and may be more likely to be reclassified as proficient in English.

"If someone is teaching you ‘A, A, Apple,’ and you’re thinking ‘A, A, Manzana,’ you’re not building on the knowledge you already bring to the table," said Victoria Hunt, the principal at Dos Puentes.

But these programs also offer a partial solution to the intractable problem of de facto school segregation. John B. King Jr., a senior adviser at the U.S. Education Department who will soon become President Barack Obama’s acting education secretary, said dual-language programs "can be a vehicle to increase socioeconomic and racial diversity in schools" by drawing more affluent parents.

At the School for International Studies, a sixth-through-12th-grade school in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, the enrollment recently shot up, to 100 sixth-grade students this year from 30 last year. The principal, Jillian Juman, estimated that half of that interest came from the school’s recently added International Baccalaureate program, and the other half from families looking for a dual-language program, which is offered there in French.

"It does allow for much more diversity," Juman said. "In terms of language, culture and socioeconomically, too."

More and more, native English-speaking parents see biliteracy in their own children as important in a global economy. In Delaware and Utah, statewide initiatives to increase dual-language education were largely conceived as a way to increase bilingualism among English speakers.

"I want two things," said Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware, a Democrat. "I want students from Delaware to be able to go anywhere and do any kind of work they want to do, and I also want to attract businesses from around the world, to say, ‘You want to be in Delaware because, amongst other things, we’ve got a bilingual workforce.’

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