Bilingual Education

The Field of Bilingual Education

Bilingual education is a multidisciplinary field with various areas of research focusing largely on three areas: (1) a linguistics-based psychological and sociological foundation, (2) a micro-classroom pedagogy and macro-education, and (3) sociolinguistic perspectives.

The area of linguistics-based psychological and sociological foundations examines historical backgrounds and develops and integrates various theories. Researchers in this area emphasize the child's bilingual and cognitive development and the effect that home and neighborhood play in this development; they investigate ways of interfacing bilingual education with minority language maintenance as well as language decay and language revival. The area involving micro-classroom pedagogy and macro-education deals with the effectiveness of bilingual programs of different types. Researchers examine essential features of bilingual classrooms that foster bilingualism and academic learning, investigate various teaching methodologies, and analyze different views of the overall value and purpose of bilingualism in conjunction with the nature of multiculturalism in society, schools, and classrooms. The sociolinguistic perspective concentrates on language planning and policy, raises critical issues reflecting diverse viewpoints about language minorities and bilingual education, investigates factors that generate disparity in preference between the assimilation of language minorities and language diversity, and examines language policies.

In dealing with the previously mentioned areas at the individual and societal levels, the field of bilingual education evolved into various types of bilingual programs. For example, a transitional bilingual program facilitates the transition from the language minority's home language to the majority's language. It is important to note that publicly funded U.S. bilingual education is, broadly speaking, transitional in that it aims essentially to move children into English-only instruction within 2 or 3 years. However, some schools offer a self-contained bilingual program in which a bilingual teacher provides instruction in two languages in all subject areas. Another interesting form of bilingual education is a two-way bilingual program (also named dual language program) in which the classes are evenly divided between students who speak English and those who speak another language. Such programs use two languages more or less equally in the curriculum so that both language-majority and language-minority children become bilingual and biliterate. Some ESL (English as a second language) programs are a form of bilingual education in that all the students speak the same language other than English and the teacher speaks the students' home language yet little or no instruction is given in a language other than English.

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