Additive and Subtractive Programs

Factors Affecting the Choice: Additive or Subtractive?

The choice of either a policy aimed at fostering and enhancing the child's home language as part of the goals of bilingual education or one that seeks the opposite—abandoning home language use as quickly as possible—does not occur by chance. Such choices are rooted in underlying assumptions concerning the benefits, risks, utility, and cultural valuing of languages other than English in the wider society. Similarly, whether native speakers of English are included in these programs determines in part what the objectives of the program will be. In the main, children who are native speakers of English would not be involved in programs of subtractive bilingual education. When such children are involved, the programs are often referred to as two-way immersion programs, also known as dual-immersion programs, because the learning of the two languages occurs in both directions. This distinction does not always hold in n in other countries. Hence, the analysis below is limited to what is clearly the case in the United States.

Background and History

Whether they are additive or subtractive, programs of bilingual education are driven by operational policies and practices relative to the student population, length of the program in each language, level of proficiency students will pursue in each language, and, importantly, the language skills required of their teachers. Of the two types, subtractive programs are the least complex. In additive programs, the effort is much more complex and demands greater modification of the curriculum and staffing patterns than is the case when a subtractive choice is made. The fact that these differences have not been well described to the schools by state and federal offices has greatly contributed to the difficulties encountered in determining whether bilingual education is effective in meeting its objectives. Program success can be determined only if and when the goals are clear and the organization, operation, and resourcing of the program are in harmony with its stated goals.

At a deeper level, we can clarify the difference between additive and subtractive forms of bilingual education by examining the policy foundations of the two approaches. Subtractive bilingual education is rooted in the tradition of remedial/compensatory education. This was the operating ideology that shaped much of the federal government's involvement in education, beginning with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 and the other large federal program, Head Start. From the outset, the government's involvement was based on a perceived need to remediate the inadequate background of children in poverty. There was a strong perception then, one that has many subscribers even today, that lack of school success by poor and minority children was due to the lack of a sufficiently robust cultural foundation on which to build—hence the need to remediate and compensate for lacunae in the child's cultural and family background. Congress was led down this path by the work of early education researchers such as James Coleman and Christopher Jencks, who had examined groups of children in poverty and concluded that it was not the failure of the schools that was operant, but rather the social and cultural matrix in which these children were raised.

...