Bilingual Education Policy and Language and Literacy Aims

The primary differentiation among bilingual education policies and programs relates to the aim of promoting bilingualism and biliteracy. So-called mainstream bilingual programs, or immersion programs, hold this aim for majority language children. Often, such programs are those of choice for parents who can afford to provide their children with an elite education.

Thus, unlike federally supported Title VII programs, which no longer exist, there has been no stigma of deficiency associated with these programs. There have been some attempts to combine biliteracy and bilingualism as a goal for both majority and minority children. To date, the most successful programs have fallen under the label of "two-way" or "dual immersion." From a policy standpoint, these programs help to promote the status of minority languages; however, this is not always achieved when languages other than English are presented as "foreign" rather than as living community languages of the United States and the world.

There has also been some concern that students in such programs can be differentially positioned based on the perceived status of their languages. For example, concerns have been raised that Spanish-speaking students of lower socioeconomic status may be "servicing" language majority English-speaking children by providing them with native-speaker modeling of the target language. In other words, in the programs' implementation, the needs of children of the majority are addressed, but not those of minorities.

Given the status differential between English and Spanish, there is a need for programmatic policies that are designed to ensure that students are treated equitably. A review of federal bilingual education policy in the United States indicates that there is substantial room for improvement if biliteracy and bilingualism are valued as educational aims for both language minority children and the general population.

There is a need to consider policies that promote both the individual and societal benefits of bilingualism. Such policies also need to ensure that language minority students have adequate access to a quality education that includes the development of English for successful participation in school and society. Moving beyond policies that merely aim to accommodate immigrant and indigenous language minority students, many believe that there is a need to develop and implement policies that value community languages and expand national language resources.

Such policies need to recognize the linguistic reality of a country in which nearly 1 out of 6 people speak languages in addition to English. Constructive language policies would also need to recognize that languages other than English are used daily in the linguistic life of the country. Policies based on our linguistic reality would do well to acknowledge that the United States is not only among the largest English-speaking nations in the world-rivaled only by India, a multilingual nation with millions who can speak English-but that it also has millions who can speak Spanish and numerous other indigenous and immigrant languages and that these languages can be resources for both language minority students and the nation as a whole.

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