Wong Fillmore, Lily (1934-)

Lily Wong Fillmore is a noted sociolinguist and researcher of language minority communities and second-language learning. She attributes the genesis of her keen and lifelong interest in the role of language in schooling to her childhood as an English learner and 12 years of volunteer work with migrant workers. Wong Fillmore was born in 1934 in Northern California and grew up in Watsonville, California. Her parents were recent immigrants from China, and she started school knowing no English, only Cantonese. She attended school with many children from immigrant backgrounds, including Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and children of Dust Bowl families. From her peers and teachers, she learned English and the importance of schooling. From helping her parents run the family restaurant, she learned the value of hard work.

Wong Fillmore recounts that the years between 1956 and 1965 were “12 glorious years,” which she spent in south Santa Clara Valley working with families in migrant camps. Observing that the language and societal situations were not always fair in educating this population, she helped locate bilingual materials from anywhere she could, including schools, [Page 907]public libraries, health department offices, and churches. A natural activist, Wong Fillmore with no formal preparation or training, worked to help the local migrant farmworkers and community.

In 1965, Wong Fillmore enrolled at San Jose State University. At the same time, she was hired as a consultant by the Santa Clara County superintendent of schools, who had noticed her work with the migrant communities. She pursued her studies seriously, choosing English and linguistics as her major and emphasis, respectively. She attributes her use of ethnographic methods in research to her study of anthropology and sociology at the time. In 1969, she graduated with a BA in English, with an emphasis in linguistics.

Between 1965 and 1974, Wong Fillmore worked in various capacities with Santa Clara County Office of Education, Union City School District, and Santa Clara School District. In one of her earlier positions, she secured funding for Santa Clara County Office of Education in 1968, the first year of federal bilingual education grants. Dubbed the “Spanish Dame Project” by Superintendent Glen Hoffman, the grant was an at-home early education project, with mothers serving as teachers and different homes serving as the learning space each day of the week. The project successfully nurtured home teachers/mothers to gain confidence in their abilities, and many went on to complete high school and college. It was a model of early education and bilingual education that valued community knowledge and settings and the role of the mother tongue in teaching and learning.

The late 1960s and early 1970s was also a critical period for the development of bilingual education programs. Wong Fillmore visited, on her first trips by air, pioneer bilingual education programs in Dade County, Florida; Wallace Lambert's programs in Montreal; and Susan Gray's programs in Nashville, Tennessee. She returned and designed bilingual early education programs in Santa Clara, featuring the role of Spanish-speaking mothers.

In addition to playing a critical role in developing early bilingual education programs, Wong Fillmore also spent the years from 1969 through 1976 pursuing her PhD in linguistics at Stanford University. She worked with the late linguist Charles Ferguson and completed her dissertation on social and cognitive strategies in second-language acquisition in 1976.

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