Saville-Troike, Muriel (1936-)

Since the beginning of her professional life, Muriel Saville-Troike has been a staunch defender of language minority children's rights to preserve their heritage language and receive a good education. Born on August 8, 1936, in Sacramento, California, she later worked as a teacher of children of migrant farm workers in California, where she sidestepped the English-only rule and used the children's native Spanish in her kindergarten classroom to assist their learning. Experiencing the language situation of these children motivated her to pursue a PhD in linguistics at the University of Texas. After receiving her doctorate in 1968, she worked in various ways to support bilingual education. Her achievements in the field include the development of bilingual materials and curricula, workshops and handbooks for bilingual educators, leadership in professional organizations to strengthen bilingual policies, and research on child second-language acquisition and learning and on native-language maintenance and loss. This entry discusses her career-long efforts for bilingual education.

A major contribution was her work on bilingual education for Navajo children. Her research on Navajo child language development underscored the importance of children's native-language maintenance and the risk of language loss caused by ill-conceived language education policies. She developed Navajo curriculum materials for the first Navajo K-1 bilingual programs for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and wrote a curriculum guide for teaching English in Navajo kindergartens. Continuing research in this area, she showed that the implementation of bilingual education on Navajo reservations resulted in increased language competence in both Navajo and English. Her more recent research demonstrates that when English-dominant educational environments are promoted, children do not develop full competence in their native language.

Saville-Troike's second major contribution reached a wider audience of bilingual educators: In 1970, she wrote, with Rudolph Troike, A Handbook of Bilingual Education for the ERIC Clearinghouse for Linguistics. Revised and reissued by the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) organization in 1971, it was for many years the most widely used textbook in bilingual teacher preparation programs in the United States. It was later translated for Spanish-Quechua bilingual educators in Ecuador. This volume was influential in defining the linguistic, psychological, and sociocultural foundations for sound pedagogy in bilingual classrooms. It offered guidelines for teaching the components of language, provided suggestions for assessment, and emphasized the need for school personnel to understand students' cultural background before designing bilingual programs. Despite the passage of 30 years and advances in linguistics and psychology, this handbook still provides solid, practical guidance for bilingual educators.

Following the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, the 1970s was a time of intensive policy development and research in bilingual education, and Saville-Troike played a major role in these activities. When the class action suit filed by parents of Chinese-speaking students in San Francisco schools resulted in the Lau v. Nichols decision in 1974, she was part of the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) task force that formulated a master [Page 728]plan for bilingual/bicultural education in San Francisco. The work resulted in the Lau Consent Decree, which stressed maintenance of the students' native language as they mastered English. When the country saw an influx of refugees from the Vietnam War, the CAL turned to Saville-Troike to help prepare teachers for meeting the needs of Indochinese refugee children. And significantly, during this period of serious debates about the respective roles of English as a Second Language (ESL) and bilingual education, as 1974–1975 president of TESOL, Saville-Troike was instrumental in developing the organization's position statement that ESL should be recognized as an essential component of bilingual education.

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