Bilingual Education

Bilingual education is a model of educating students in public schools in their native language and in English. The goal of bilingual programs is the attainment of biliteracy. Biliteracy includes communicative and academic literacy skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in one's native language and in English. Within this model, a student's native language and culture are valued and recognized as assets to learning and society. Bilingualism is achieved in most programs in which a student's native language/literacy is the foundation for transitioning to English only or mainstream classroom instruction. This approach, considered subtractive bilingualism, systematically replaces the native language with English. James Tollefson reports that the loss of language is accompanied by a loss of culture. In subtractive programs, students are forced to assimilate into the dominant group, oftentimes leaving their native language and culture behind.

A biliteracy model is based on the ideology of cultural pluralism, which ensures that students maintain both their language and their culture while acquiring the language of the dominant culture. This is additive bilingualism, in which a student's native language and culture are seen as an asset to learning.

As linguistic and cultural diversity increase in the United States, many students in classrooms will speak with parents and grandparents in languages other than English. David Berliner and Bruce Biddle report that by 2020, at least 50% of school-age children will be of non-Euro-American background, and by 2030, language minority students will make up 40% of the school population.

One common ideal held by most Americans is that English is not only the most viable but also pedagogically the most suitable language in which to learn. Critical pedagogists have put forth credible debates concerning the need to include cultural democracy and social justice as alternative ways of viewing bilingual education. Even when social justice is considered in educational conversations, the question of language of instruction is rarely raised and most often is relegated to the margins. In considering social justice in the context of bilingual education, it is acknowledged that language and literacy are more than parts of speech (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives) and sound systems (e.g., phonemes, morphemes). Language use and teaching methods also reflect an ideology that has the potential to empower or marginalize [Page 237]learners. Jim Cummins reports that language is inherently tied to one's culture and community and that language cannot be separated into discrete skills apart from the person, culture, or community. Kenji Hakuta and Catherine Snow state that language is not a unitary skill, but a complex configuration of abilities.

English language development occurs on two planes; first is English for social communication skills, referred to as playground English, or what Cummins names basic interpersonal communication skills. The second plane is academic English, or cognitive academic proficiency skills (CALPS). CALPS, according to Cummins, is the cognitively demanding language that children need to succeed in school. Basic interpersonal communication skills tend to be acquired rapidly by most children in and out of school, whereas CALPS is acquired in school, over a period of 5 to 7 years. The result of biliteracy is proficiency in social and academic literacy in two languages.

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