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Bilingual Education, History of
Bilingual education, or instruction in more than one language, has occurred throughout history and around the world. A review of that history reveals that practices and beliefs related to languages in education are intricately connected to attitudes toward linguistic and cultural diversity, and especially toward indigenous, ethnic, and foreign groups. Perhaps it is for these reasons that bilingual education inspires controversy and raises questions not only of pedagogy, but also of politics and ideology.
The history of bilingual education is not a steady movement in a single direction; rather, there is a constant flux of policies, practices, and ideology. Proponents of bilingual education stress the academic, cognitive, and cultural advantages that accrue to individuals and to society when children maintain and develop their home language and attain academic competence in another language as well. Opponents of bilingual education stress the need for cultural and linguistic assimilation, and posit that time spent learning in a minority language detracts from academic and linguistic development in the majority language. Struggles between these two views, as well as conflicting beliefs about the nature of diversity and the goals of education, are sure to continue. This entry looks at the development of bilingual education over the course of U.S. history and reviews contrasting international approaches.
Program Descriptions
The term bilingual education is popularly used for a wide variety of educational models, including some in which the only “bilingual” component is that some or most of the students are bilingual. This entry will consider educational settings in which more than one language is used in instruction, but this definition too covers a wide range of practices and goals.
Bilingual programs around the world serve immigrant and indigenous speakers of minority languages, as well as children of middle-class and affluent parents who seek bilingualism for enrichment. Among different types of programs, an important distinction is between transitional and maintenance bilingual education. In transitional programs, the use of native languages is encouraged only in the short term, for the purpose of helping students learn the majority language (i.e., English in the United States). By contrast, in maintenance programs the goal is not only second language acquisition, but also language and literacy skills in the native language. One type of maintenance program is the dual-language or two-way model, in which both languages are used, often (and ideally) with approximately half the students proficient in one language, and the other half proficient in the other, with both groups learning language and content in both languages.
Yet another type of bilingual education is heritage language instruction, in which lessons are delivered in a minority language, often one that is in danger of extinction. It is significant that the terms majoritylanguage and minority language refer not to the relative number of speakers, but rather, to the relative power and dominance of the speakers of that language.
U.S. History
Although bilingual education was common in the early history of the United States, it was virtually eliminated in the first half of the twentieth century, until a renaissance of bilingual education occurred in the 1960s both in the United States and around the world.
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