But the hows of equal access have been left up to the schools. The Supreme Court offered some guidance in its 1981 decision in Castaneda vs. Pickard, ruling that a district's alternative language program must meet three tests:
Still, there is no court mandate for choosing one program over another. As long as the program is "recognized as sound by at least some experts," it's acceptable. But expert opinion is mixed, and is further confounded by politics. The nation's current anti-immigrant climate--reinforced by the vocal and emotional English-only movement--makes it tough to objectively sort through the arguments, which tend to come from two camps: bilingual education advocates on one hand and English-language immersion advocates on the other. If a district opts for bilingual instruction, for example, how does it weigh the relative merits of transitional bilingual education and bilingual-bicultural maintenance, or make even finer distinctions between, say, early-exit and late-exit transitional bilingual programs?
Until recently, the research base on models for second-language acquisition added more confusion than clarity. Some studies on immersion programs, for instance, have focused on "Canadian-style immersion," which actually has a bilingual component and therefore can't be classified as pure immersion. Other studies have produced inconsistent or even contradictory findings that lend themselves to conflicting conclusions depending on who interprets the data.
Despite the sometimes-inconclusive data, a number of recent studies and syntheses by authoritative researchers and linguists have made solid findings in favor of teaching academic content in children's first language. There is a growing body of evidence to support the view that bilingual education models--particularly the "late-exit transitional," "bilingual-bicultural maintenance," and "developmental bilingual" models--hold the most promise for teaching English while letting language-minority kids catch up to their native-English peers.
THERE IS ONE POINT ON WHICH ALMOST EVERYONE AGREES: Submersion--tossing a non-English-speaking child into an English-only classroom without any assistance or accommodation for the language barrier--doesn't work and is unacceptable. In the "sink-or-swim" approach, most kids sink. But that's where agreement ends. Debate swirls around such questions as, Should language-minority children be taught in their first language? If so, how often and how long? What role should schools play in preserving the linguistic and cultural heritage of immigrant students? Can children who receive no instruction in their first language catch up and compete with their native English-speaking classmates?
Arguing that a school's goal should be to Americanize and acculturate immigrant children as quickly as possible, opponents of bilingual education contend that teaching children in their first language only delays the acquisition of English and postpones the day when they can join their peers in the mainstream classroom. "How years of being taught mostly in Korean, Spanish, or Portugese can produce rapid and effective learning of English is still a mystery and, in practice, an illusion," says one of bilingual education's most outspoken critics, Rosalie Pedalino Porter of the READ Institute, in an Education Week commentary published May 18, 1994.
The National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) takes exception to statements which, like Porter's, suggest that students in bilingual programs are taught "mostly" in their first language. This "often-heard claim is wholly refuted" by two U.S. Department of Education studies (including the Ramirez study discussed below) validated by the National Academy of Sciences, NABE asserts in its 1995 publication Bilingual Education: Separating Fact from Fiction. The studies found that transitional bilingual programs, where the goal is to move the child as quickly as possible into all-English classes, used English 65 percent of the time in kindergarten and, by fourth grade, 97 percent of the time. Even in developmental bilingual programs, where the goal is fluency in both languages, English was used more than half the time after second grade, the studies found.
Deep proficiency in a second language takes far longer to attain than surface fluency, researchers are finding. While it is true that Spanish-speaking and other immigrant children can pick up rudimentary English skills fast, the complexity of lunchroom or playground language doesn't approach the complexity of classroom language. "Many minority students can develop a relatively high degree of English communicative skills within about two years of exposure to English-speaking peers, television, and schooling," says Jim Cummins in Bilingualism and Special Education: Issues in Assessment and Pedagogy published by College Hill Press in 1984. "However, it is not valid to extrapolate from minority students' face-to-face conversational fluency to their overall proficiency in English...A considerably longer period of time is required to learn sufficient English to perform at the same level in academic tasks as native English speakers than is usually required to converse fluently in face-to-face situations."
The speedy "Berlitz" approach to language instruction may equip the learner with linguistic survival skills, but it hardly prepares her to write a paper, for example, on the symbolism of the white whale in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, NABE notes. Such a paper requires complex cognitive skills such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation that are not necessary for ordering a Big Mac but are critical to school success.
Examining the school records of 42,000 language-minority students around the United States, researchers Virginia Collier and Wayne Thomas of George Mason University have found that in schools giving all-English instruction, students take five to 10 years to reach grade-level norms in English: seven to 10 years if they had no schooling in their native country, and five to seven years if they had some schooling (at least two or three before coming to the United States. In contrast, students schooled bilingually in the United States typically reach and surpass native speakers' performance after four to seven years.
"Our data show that extensive cognitive and academic development in students' first language is crucial to second-language academic success," the researchers write in "Second-Language Acquisition for School: Academic, Cognitive, Sociocultural, and Linguistic Processes" published in the Georgetown University Round Table Proceedings in December 1995. "Contrary to the popular idea that it takes a motivated student a short time to acquire a second language, our studies examining immigrants and language-minority students in many different regions of the U.S. and with many background characteristics have found that four to 12 years of second-language development are needed for the most advantaged students to reach deep academic proficiency and compete successfully with native speakers."
This recent study backs up findings of an earlier study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education to weigh the relative effectiveness of three program models for teaching Spanish-speaking students:
Dubbed the "Ramirez study" for lead researcher J. David Ramirez of R.T. International, the study followed more than 2,000 students for four years, gathering information on child, family, classroom, teacher, school, district, and community. The data, published in 1991, documented that students need six or more years to learn a second language, Ramirez asserts in his executive summary, published in Bilingual Research Journal, Winter/Spring 1992. The data also lend support to the notion that the more instruction children get in their first language, the better they perform in their second.
Ramirez found that while children in all-English and bilingual programs showed comparable performance during the early elementary grades, the students in immersion and early-exit bilingual programs began lagging behind in later grades. Writes Ramirez: "Providing substantial instruction in the primary language appears to help LEP [limited-English-proficient] students catch up to their English-speaking peers in mainstream classrooms in English language, reading, and mathematics. In contrast, providing all instruction in English or with modest amounts of primary language instruction does not appear to help LEP students catch up to the norming population."
Collier and Thomas draw similar conclusions from their study: "From fourth grade on through middle school and high school, when the academic and cognitive demands of the curriculum increase rapidly with each succeeding year, students with little or no academic and cognitive development in their first language do less and less well as they move into the upper grades."
THE RAMIREZ AND COLLIER/THOMAS STUDIES REINFORCE EARLIER FINDINGS of Jim Cummins, who reported in the early 1980s that immigrant students who arrived in Canada at age six or seven took an average of five to seven years to match their English-speaking peers in English verbal and academic skills. Notes Cummins: "The fact that immigrant students require, on the average, five to seven years to approach grade norms in L2 [second-language] academic skills, yet show peer-appropriate L2 conversational skills within about two years of arrival, suggests that conversational and academic aspects of language proficiency need to be distinguished."
For one thing, academic tasks are often abstract and removed from the student's immediate surroundings or experiences. Cummins makes a distinction between "context-embedded" and "disembedded" thought. The cues students use to make sense of talk--the sights and sounds and signals that provide context for spoken language--are often reduced in the academic environment, he notes.
Cummins, Collier, and others have argued that the higher-order thinking skills and deeper conceptual abilities students need as they progress in school are best acquired in the child's first language. "With each succeeding grade, academic work (in language arts, math, science, and social studies) gets cognitively more complex," Collier writes. "Academic knowledge and conceptual development transfer from first language to second language; thus, it is more efficient to develop academic work through students' first language, while teaching second language during other periods of the school day through meaningful academic content.
"In early decades in the U.S.," she continues, "we emphasized teaching second language as the first step, and postponed the teaching of academics. Research has shown us that postponing or interrupting academic development in first and second languages is likely to produce academic failure."
Besides allowing language-minority students to develop deeper cognitive skills in their first language, then, bilingual instruction lets students advance quickly in math, science, history, and other academic subjects at the same time that they are mastering English. In a 1994 report to the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, the U.S. General Accounting Office supports this notion, saying, "Bilingual instruction allows for more detailed and richer coverage of academic subjects because it facilitates a faster pace and allows more examples to be used."
BILINGUAL EDUCATION CAN TAKE MANY HAPES.It can be a short-term tool for moving students quickly into mainstream classrooms, as in the "early-exit transitional" programs studied by Ramirez where second-language instruction is phased out by third grade. The "late-exit" model--which retains second-language instruction through sixth grade and which Ramirez found to be more effective than early-exit--is also a transitional approach, with an emphasis on replacing students' first language with their second. But late-exit models come closer to developmental bilingual and bilingual-bicultural maintenance models, which seek to retain and build upon the child's first language while developing the second.
In distinguishing between developmental/maintenance and transitional models, some researchers note that one approach is "additive," the other "subtractive." A number of educators and linguists have pointed out the irony of supplanting the language skills children bring to school. Paraphrasing Professor Mary Ashworth of the University of British Columbia, Jim Cummins notes in Empowering Minority Students published by the California Association for Bilingual Education in 1989: "The roots of the term education imply drawing out children's potential, making them more than they were; however, when children come to school fluent in their primary language and they leave school monolingual in English, then our schools have negated the meaning of the term education because they have made children less than they were."
It is around this issue--the role schools should play in preserving and nurturing children's language and cultural identity--that the bilingual debate ultimately turns. Critic Rosalie Pedalino Porter argues that schools' job is to instill English skills, not preserve culture. "Let us not confuse the private freedom to use any language at home and keep any cultural traditions, which rights we all have, with the priorities and responsibilities of public education," she writes. "Families or groups that choose to retain language and culture may promote after-school programs or private language schools, but such preservation cannot be a responsibility of the public schools with their limited resources and broader responsibilities."
Such arguments, however, ignore what we know: that cultural identity is closely linked to self-esteem, and self-esteem is tied to academic achievement. Another link that is clearly established in the research literature is the connection between parental involvement and student outcomes. Without honoring a child's language and culture, schools cannot hope to draw language-minority parents into the educational process, and without such involvement, children's chances for success diminish. Notes Cummins: "There is considerable evidence that academic progress is facilitated by means of programs that strongly reinforce students' cultural identity."
THE SPOKEN AND UNSPOKEN MESSAGES EDUCATORS COMMUNICATE to children about the value of their language and their culture are a critical part of what Virginia Collier terms the "sociocultural processes" that affect how well children learn and, ultimately, how far they go in school and beyond. Sociocultural processes include such factors as students' self-esteem, the instructional milieu (for instance, is it cooperative or competitive?), majority-minority relations in the school, and prejudice in the community.
Notes Collier: "Sociocultural processes strongly influence, in both positive and negative ways, students' access to cognitive, academic, and language development. It is crucial that educators provide a socioculturally supportive school environment that allows natural language, academic, and cognitive development to happen."
The instructional milieu is one sociocultural factor that teachers can affect directly. There is strong evidence that second-language students thrive in classrooms where "interactive/experiential approaches to pedagogy" are the norm, in Cummins' words. Significantly, these practices--whole language, cooperative learning, discovery learning, problem solving--are the same practices that educational researchers are finding work best with all children. But too often, minority-language students instead wind up on unchallenging, remedial tracks that present a watered-down curriculum with a fill-in-the-blanks approach.
Collier and Thomas distinguish between what they call "traditional" and "current" methods of language teaching.
"Students do less well in programs that focus on discrete units of language taught in a structured, sequenced curriculum with the learner treated as a passive recipient of knowledge," they say in their report Research Summary of Study in Progress: Results as of September 1995. "Students achieve significantly better in programs that teach language through cognitively complex academic content in math, science, social studies, and literature, taught through problem-solving, discovery learning in highly interactive classroom activities. ESL pull-out in the early grades, taught traditionally, is the least successful program model for students' long-term success."
Collier and Thomas go on to note that certain program characteristics can make a "significant difference" in academic achievement for students entering U.S. schools at the secondary level when first-language instructional support cannot be provided. They are: teaching second language through academic content; teaching learning strategies that develop thinking skills and problem-solving abilities; and supporting continuous staff development with an emphasis on activation of students' prior knowledge, respect for students' home language and culture, intense and meaningful cognitive/academic development, and ongoing assessment using multiple measures.
STUDENT EMPOWERMENT SHOULD BE THE LONG-TERM GOAL OF ANY PROGRAM for language-minority students, in Cummins' view. "Educators who see their role as adding a second language and cultural affiliation to students' repertoire," he says, "are likely to empower students more than those who see their role as replacing or subtracting students' primary language and culture in the process of teaching English and assimilating students to the dominant culture."
Cummins is careful to note, however, that the "additive orientation" can exist whether or not bilingual instruction is possible or practical. Reinforcing Collier's emphasis on the importance of a supportive sociocultural environment to children's achievement, Cummins says in his article "Empowering Minority Students: A Framework for Intervention" published by Harvard Educational Review in February 1986: "Educators communicate to students and parents in a variety of ways the extent to which students' language and culture is valued within the context of the school. Even within a monolingual school context, powerful messages can be communicated to students regarding the validity and advantages of language development."
NOTE: The research findings of Collier and Thomas summarized in the working paper, Research Summary of Study in Progress: Results as of September 1995, cited above, can be found in an article to be published this year by the Bilingual Research Journal. Also see the article "Second-Language Acquisition for School: Academic, Cognitive, Sociocultural, and Linguistic Processes" in the Georgetown University Round Table Proceedings, December 1995.
--Lee Sherman Caudell
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