MacKenzie, Peter (2001). Bilingual Education: Who Wants It? Who Needs It?, International Schools Journal. Reports that in international schools, a second language is usually taught only if the second language is English. Argues that the students missing out in this approach are monolingual native speakers of English. Concludes that British and American students are most in need of bilingual education. Descriptors: Bilingual Education, Bilingualism, Elementary Secondary Education, English

Tiwana, Ravneet Kaur (2007). Panjabi Language Instruction at the American Sikh Temple School: A Site for Hybrid Cultural Socialization, Online Submission. It has been claimed that there is only one language, the English language in the United States, because America is not a "polyglot boardinghouse …" (Portes and Rumbaut 196). The fact is that America has always been a multilingual society, even though this mythical notion of a monolingual American identity reflecting American loyalty remains with us- as evident in current debates on bilingual education. Many believe academic success can be achieved through an English-only policy that strips immigrant children of the cultural and social capital embedded in their heritage languages skills. Hence, "Americanization" lead by the American public educational system seems to be aimed at, despite its good intentions as the "greatest equalizer… [to] alter immigrant culture through language policies where it [is] environmentally most permeable- the care and instruction of children" (Fass 24). To circumvent this form of "Americanization", many religious and ethnic minority groups have sponsored their own language schools (Steinberg 2001:54). In this paper, I argue that these schools are sites of hybrid cultural socialization through language and religious instruction. By using participant-observation, freelisting, and pilesorting qualitative method techniques, I will show how students believe that attending American Sikh Temple School has a language and religious learning component along as well as socializing with peers. Therefore, providing initial insight into how these heritage language schools are sites of hybrid cultural socialization.   [More]  Descriptors: Indo European Languages, Religious Cultural Groups, Heritage Education, Native Language Instruction

Ma, Jacinta (2002). What Works for the Children? What We Know and Don't Know about Bilingual Education. Currently, there is no overall strategy for comprehensively addressing the academic needs of English Language Learners (ELLs). Their right to equal opportunities to participate and learn has been recognized by federal law. There is limited evidence regarding bilingual education and effective strategies for educating ELLs. Research indicates that 1 year of English instruction is generally inadequate to prepare ELLs to succeed in general education classes taught only in English. Results from implementing California's 1-year English immersion programs show that these programs are not the success claimed by Unz Initiative proponents. Research indicates that achievement gaps between native English speakers and ELLs are widening, and teachers are seriously demoralized. As a civil rights matter, the future of bilingual education programs for ELLs must depend on the what works for children and not on who makes the decision. One type of support program should not be imposed on all schools. Parents and school districts have the right to implement different bilingual education and language support programs that meet rigorous, broadly accepted standards and local needs. Nine recommendations emphasize the importance of clarifying the goals of language support programs, providing additional high quality instruction for ELLs and additional funding to improve the quality of ELL education. (Contains 75 endnotes.)   [More]  Descriptors: Academic Achievement, Bilingual Education, Bilingual Students, Civil Rights

Gershberg, Alec Ian; Danenberg, Anne; Sanchez, Patricia (2006). Beyond "Bilingual" Education: New Immigrants and Public School Policies in California, Urban Institute Press. The United States has a long record of ambivalence toward recent immigrants. Nowhere is this love-hate relationship more evident than in the public school systems of high-immigration states like California, where pro- and anti-immigration advocates have waged a long-running battle over "bilingual" education versus "English immersion" programs. Unfortunately, this fierce political debate does not always acknowledge day-to-day reality in the schools, and the policies that result may ultimately hinder the schools and students they intend to help. Beyond Bilingual Education cuts through the politics, offering a statistical portrait of English language learners in five large California school districts and highlighting the results of more than 120 interviews conducted with teachers, school administrators, and community service providers about the challenges facing recent immigrants and the schools that serve them. This combined approach yields essential intelligence for policymakers, advocates, and administrators seeking to escape the trap of immigration politics. It is a vital perspective, because how schools receive, treat, and educate these future workers will directly affect the country's economic and social health and progress. This book starts with acknowledgments and abbreviations. It contains seven chapters: (1) Immigrant Education-The Program and Policy Landscape; (2) Recent Immigrant and ELL Students and Their Schools; (3) School Achievement and Resources: The Differing Experience of Recent Immigrant and ELL Students; (4) Recent Immigrant Challenges and Public School Responses; (5) The Debate over Language Acquisition: Caught between "Bilingual" Education and English Immersion' (6) Educator Evaluations of Language Assessment, Placement, and Accountability Systems; and (7) Mapping Recent Immigrant Students onto the Education Political Landscape: Summary, Policy Recommendations, and Directions for the Future.  The following are appended: (1) California State Programs Serving Immigrant and ELL Students; (2) Data Sources, Descriptive Methods, and Additional Quantitative Analysis; (3) Selection Processes and Methods for Interviews; (4) Coding Criteria for Language Assessment and Accountability Analysis; (5) Additional Discussion on General Impressions of the Academic Performance Index (API); and (6) Sample Home Language Survey. An epilogue and references are included.   [More]  Descriptors: Immigrants, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Students

Zehr, Mary Ann (2010). Tailoring Lessons for English-Learners, Education Week. Educators in the Chula Vista Elementary School District determined what kind of instruction students needed through a "response to intervention" (RTI) process, which provides extra help to struggling students with an aim of reducing the number of referrals to special education. As RTI catches on throughout the country, the district is on the cutting edge in its focus on how the approach applies to English-language learners (ELLs), who make up 36 percent of the K-6 district's 27,450 students. Chula Vista started using RTI during the 2004-2005 school year. In the 2006-2007 school year, it hired Douglas Fisher, a professor of teacher education at San Diego State University, as a consultant to figure out how to apply RTI to students who don't have a command of English. RTI has helped the district dramatically raise test scores in mathematics and reading for ELLs. In 2008, the California Association for Bilingual Education recognized the district with its "seal of excellence" award. For the past two years, the district has ranked high on California's academic performance index. It scored 833 on the state's growth accountability index in the 2008-2009 school year, as 31 of its 44 schools exceeded the target of 800. In addition, the Chula Vista Elementary district has never missed its state's goals for adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which is unusual for a school system with so many students who aren't fluent in English. The approach applies instruction with differing intensity, duration, and frequency for different students. In Chula Vista and across the country, RTI provides instructional triage with three "tiers." All students receive Tier 1 instruction, in which teachers ideally take into account the individual needs of students in their regular instruction. In Tier 2, a subset of students who need additional help receives interventions in small groups. Lastly, some students are identified for Tier 3; they receive even more intensive help such as daily one-on-one instruction. In many school districts, Tier 3 equals special education. In Chula Vista, that is true for some students who aren't ELLs. However, schools are urged to wait until after Tier 3 intervention has been tried before referring an English-learner for special education evaluation. Educators need to ensure they aren't mistaking a language barrier as a disability. The most impressive changes in the Chula Vista district have occurred with improving the quality of core instruction, or Tier 1 instruction, to meet the needs of ELLs.   [More]  Descriptors: Elementary Schools, School Districts, Early Intervention, Formative Evaluation

Adair, Jennifer Keys; Tobin, Joseph; Arzubiaga, Angela E. (2012). The Dilemma of Cultural Responsiveness and Professionalization: Listening Closer to Immigrant Teachers Who Teach Children of Recent Immigrants, Teachers College Record. Background/Context: Many scholars in the fields of teacher education, multicultural education, and bilingual education have argued that children of recent immigrants are best served in classrooms that have teachers who understand the cultural background and the home language of their students. Culturally knowledgeable and responsive teachers are important in early education and care settings that serve children from immigrant families. However, there is little research on immigrant teachers' cultural and professional knowledge or on their political access to curricular/pedagogical decision-making. Focus of Study: This study is part of the larger Children Crossing Borders (CCB) study: a comparative study of what practitioners and parents who are recent immigrants in multiple countries think should happen in early education settings. Here, we present an analysis of the teacher interviews that our team conducted in the United States and compare the perspectives of immigrant teachers with those of their nonimmigrant counterparts, specifically centering on the cultural expertise of immigrant teachers who work within their own immigrant community. Research Design: The research method used in the CCB project is a variation of the multivocal ethnographic research method used in the two Preschool in Three Cultures studies. We made videotapes of typical days in classrooms for 4-year-olds in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings in five countries (England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States) and then used these videos as cues for focus group interviews with parents and teachers. Using a coding framework designed by the national CCB team, we coded 30 focus group interviews. The coding framework was designed to facilitate comparisons across countries, cities, and categories of participants (teachers and parents, immigrant and nonimmigrant). Findings/Results: Teachers who are themselves immigrants from the same communities of the children and families they serve seem perfectly positioned to bridge the cultural and linguistic worlds of home and school. However, our study of teachers in five U.S. cities at a number of early childhood settings suggests that teachers who are themselves immigrants often experience a dilemma that prevents them from applying their full expertise to the education and care of children of recent immigrants. Rather than feeling empowered by their bicultural, bilingual knowledge and their connection to multiple communities, many immigrant teachers instead report that they often feel stuck between their pedagogical training and their cultural knowledge. Conclusions/Recommendations: Bicultural, bilingual staff, and especially staff members who are themselves immigrants from the community served by the school, can play an invaluable role in parent-staff dialogues, but only if their knowledge is valued, enacted, and encouraged as an extension of their professional role as early childhood educators. For the teachers, classrooms, and structures in our study, this would require nonimmigrant practitioners to have a willingness to consider other cultural versions of early childhood pedagogy as having merit and to enter into dialogue with immigrant teachers and immigrant communities.   [More]  Descriptors: Immigrants, Bilingual Education, Cultural Background, Ethnography

Tacelosky, Kathleen (2001). Bilingual Education and Language Use among the Shipibo of the Peruvian Amazon, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. Investigates how language choice for education contributes to changes in the way a society views and uses language in the context of the Peruvian Amazon. Oral surveys were administered to Shipibo people in 13 communities along the Ucayali River of eastern Peru where a transition type bilingual education program was introduced several decades ago. Descriptors: Bilingual Education Programs, Foreign Countries, Indigenous Populations, Language of Instruction

Arroyo, Jose Luis Blas (2002). The Languages of the Valencian Educational System: The Results of Two Decades of Language Policy, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. The compulsory education system in the autonomous Spanish region known as the Comunidad Valenciano has offered a varied program of bilingual education. Spanish and Valenciano, an autochthonous variety of Catalan, alternate according to various curricular programs as the main teaching languages. Examines the objectives of each of these programs, as well as data that serve to evaluate the results generated by the application of the said programs. Descriptors: Bilingual Education, Bilingualism, Foreign Countries, Language of Instruction

Galindo, Rene (2007). Voices of Identity in a Chicana Teacher's Occupational Narratives of the Self, Urban Review: Issues and Ideas in Public Education. The research area of teacher narrative inquiry has identified links between the personal and professional identities of teachers. Although teacher narrative inquiry takes narrative texts as its data, insufficient attention has been given to the functions of narratives as forms of discourse that are utilized in the construction of identity. In the present study, the concept of narrative identity guided the analysis of a Chicana teacher's personal experience narratives. The analysis of six narratives told during interviews conducted across a year's time examined how the voices in the narratives, communicated through reported speech, represented the relational, discursive, and ideological social worlds within which the Chicana teacher's occupational identity was shaped. The reported speech in the Chicana teacher's narratives quoted the voices of significant Others, such as her family members and the parents of her students. The Chicana teacher's narratives crafted her response to the tensions and challenges that these voices represented to her emerging occupational identity as a bilingual education teacher. In her narratives, the Chicana teacher also constructed continuity across the distinct phases of her occupational identity as a bilingual teacher that included transitions from college student, to novice bilingual teacher, to experienced bilingual teacher.   [More]  Descriptors: Bilingual Education, Bilingual Teachers, Personal Narratives, Bilingualism

Wiese, Ann-Marie; Garcia, Eugene E. (2001). The Bilingual Education Act: Language Minority Students and US Federal Educational Policy, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Traces the United States Bilingual Education Act (BEA) from its inception in 1968 through its most recent reauthorization in 1994 as the primary federal legislative effort to provide equal educational opportunity to language minority students in the United States. Descriptors: Bilingual Education, Federal Legislation, Language Minorities, Policy Formation

Mckee, Rachel Locker (2008). The Construction of Deaf Children as Marginal Bilinguals in the Mainstream, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. The political discourse of Deaf ethnolinguistic identity has empowered Deaf people in recent decades to deconstruct a pathological model of deafness and the deficit pedagogy that centres on acquisition of speech and social assimilation. The engagement of Deaf community members in consultation and employment in the New Zealand (NZ) education system has progressed the ideological recognition of Deaf claims for a bilingual identity and pedagogy in the education arena. However these priorities sit uneasily within the special education discourse which assumes an individual needs-based approach to accommodating diverse learners in regular school settings. The recognition of sign language and Deaf experience as valid cultural capital raises questions about the sociolinguistic status and educational needs of deaf children individually enrolled in mainstream schools, contexts which do not currently afford the interactional conditions for a sign bilingual education. Based on a larger study of deaf children in NZ mainstream primary schools, this paper analyses an illustrative case study of a 10-year-old deaf boy with a cochlear implant, to critically consider the extent to which mainstreamed deaf learners are constructed as potential bilinguals in the discourse that defines and addresses their needs. Analysis shows this learner to be positioned as a marginal bilingual or defective monolingual by the aggregation of beliefs, decisions, interactions and resources that construct his educational context. Finally, the paper reports the vision of Deaf informants working in the mainstream school system for changing learning outcomes, from a construct of deaf children as members of a collective with a heritage of cultural adaptations that should inform appropriate educational responses.   [More]  Descriptors: Educational Needs, Sign Language, Bilingual Education, Deafness

Dalton-Puffer, Christiane; Llinares, Ana; Lorenzo, Francisco; Nikula, Tarja (2014). "You Can Stand under My Umbrella": Immersion, Clil and Bilingual Education. a Response to Cenoz, Genesee & Gorter (2013), Applied Linguistics. Classrooms the world over are full of people who, for different reasons, are learning additional languages and/or are studying through languages that are not their first. Gaining insight into such contexts is complicated for researchers and practitioners alike by the myriad of contextual variables that come with different implementations and make comparison and generalization a tricky business. We welcome Cenoz et al.'s (2013) article as an important contribution to the debate on how best to tackle this problem. In this Forum piece we would like to, however, redress the balance on two issues: the fact that terminologies have histories and the emphases on the research agenda suggested for future Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) research.   [More]  Descriptors: Second Language Learning, Immersion Programs, Bilingual Education, Holistic Approach

Herrera, Socorro; Murry, Kevin G. (1999). In the Aftermath of Unz, Bilingual Research Journal. Analyzes three public controversies related to California's Proposition 227: English as endangered language versus students' right to appropriate education, bilingual education versus structured English immersion, and local control and professional volition versus state-mandated English-only education. Outlines an advocacy framework applicable to student diversity and bilingual education and encompassing issues identification, defensibility, and teacher leadership. (Contains 35 references.) Descriptors: Activism, Advocacy, Bilingual Education, Diversity (Student)

Benson, Carolyn J. (2002). Real and Potential Benefits of Bilingual Programmes in Developing Countries, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Argues that bilingual education in developing countries represents an encouraging facet of efforts to improve primary schooling both quantitatively in terms of participation and qualitatively in terms of learning processes. Using examples from Guinea-Bissau, Niger, Mozambique, and Bolivia, demonstrates advantages of bilingual programming in educational development. Argues that use of mother tongue positively impacts quality indicators that have often been neglected in the drive for universal primary education. Descriptors: Bilingual Education, Bilingualism, Developing Nations, Educational Benefits

Flores, Susana Y.; Murillo, Enrique G., Jr. (2001). Power, Language, and Ideology: Historical and Contemporary Notes on the Dismantling of Bilingual Education, Urban Review. Situates the politics of language surrounding the passage of California's Proposition 227, discussing historical and contemporary conditions leading to the recent dismantling of bilingual education. Reviews the dynamics of power, language, and ideology from precolonial times until the present, and uses them to suggest that the hegemonic bond of language is a continual thread that carries over to the new millennium. Descriptors: Bilingual Education, Civil Rights, Educational History, Elementary Secondary Education