Limited English Proficiency

Bilingual Controversy

Unfortunately, this area of educational praxis is highly politicized and controversial. In American education law and politics, there is no more volatile mix of policy, research, folklore, myth, and xenophobia than in the various state and federal laws and regulations addressing the needs of language minority students attempting to learn English. As a result, even the term bilingual has become polemic.

Bilingual is monolithic neither in its meaning nor in the programs it describes. The term is generally used as a label to describe several programs and a group of theories and varied implementation practices to address the needs of ELLs in public education that to some extent utilize the abilities of students with their native languages to facilitate acquisition of the target languages. However, the term bilingual, and thus to some extent the methodology it employs, has become politicized. The administration of President George W. Bush has excised the term bilingual from almost all documents, and the word is almost nonexistent in the extensive No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) (2002). The Office for Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs of the United States Department of Education has undergone a name and focus change, with the word bilingual being excised from its name and focus. Currently, it is called the Office of English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited English Proficient Students.

Research Issues

In such a policy environment, it is difficult to conduct, access, and utilize research in meeting the needs of language minority students. Some states have actually outlawed bilingual methods for meeting the needs of ELLs. The laws in these states have declared that immersion or sheltered immersion for a year by waiver, followed by immersion in the target language, is the only worthwhile and certainly the only legally allowable methodology. The first of these was passed by referendum, Proposition 227 in California, followed by similar but increasingly stringent referenda in Arizona and Massachusetts. Totalizing pronouncements in these referenda laws, such as the following from California, [Page 517]have replaced research on language acquisition: “Whereas, young immigrant children can easily acquire full fluency in a new language, such as English, if they are heavily exposed to that language in the classroom at an early age.” Such authoritative pronouncements do not necessarily reflect all or even most of the research in this area.

The results of research on bilingual methodologies have, in fact, often contradicted the reasoning behind current administration policy. For example, a recent meta-analytical study combining earlier research regarding the effectiveness of bilingual versus monolingual educational methods, conducted by a panel of researchers selected by the Bush administration, found small to modest gains from bilingual programs. The researchers also discovered that greater gains were revealed in those studies that used random assignment and other more rigorous and effective research designs. However, after seeing the findings, the Bush administration declined to release the report.

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