Bilingual education and equity in education November 5, 2009

This article led me to think about so many things related to bilingual education, policy, and assessment. According to Palmer and Lynch, bilingual children and their teachers are challenged by the standardized testing and curriculum that stress bilingual children’s acquisition of English and mono-lingual environment. Their struggles and challenges come from the constraints and control from the standardized testing: Teachers could not employ alternative instructions to support bilingual children better; teachers made decision to change instructional language due to transition policy rather than as a pedagogical decision. In fact, it is frustrating to imagine that teachers have to make a decision for students not because of their pedagogical or philosophical intent, but by force.

 I really wonder how transition works. In my mind, I do not understand the basic assumption of transitioning that the policy has. It seems to me that this transition policy does not reflect dynamic changes of the world. As Palmer and Lynch indicate, children who come to US after certain grade level cannot get a primary language support. In addition, even if children could get an institutionalized primary language support, not every child could achieve the same level of language competence at the same time.

 This article led me to think about “aims of education” in terms of purpose of curriculum, purpose of testing, and purpose of policy, and purpose of language choice at school (Noddings, 2003). According to Noddings, our pedagogical choices, purpose of instruction, and what needs to be addressed are depending on our aims for education. She indicates that the aims of education in our current society are focused on equity – more specifically economic equity in children’s future. From this perspective, it seems that acquiring English is important for bilingual children to achieve such equity. In other words, English seems a tool that bilingual children need to gain an access to mainstream values that is recognized and emphasized in school. 

However, it is questionable that such economic equity can be achieved by children’s master of English and assimilation with mainstream culture (Noddings, 2003). It seems that under the name of equity, not only bilingual children but also other children who are underrepresented in society are getting lost of their agency over their knowledge from their experiences, language, and culture. In addition, while struggling with system (e.g. testing), it seems that they lose opportunities to think about they who they are, who they could become, and who they want to be(come).

If we think about why it is important for bilingual children to acquire English and/or to improve both languages, we might be able to consider how we can support these children. Then, it might not be important when they need to transit from their first language to English or whether they need to take test in English or in their first language.  If they really need to learn and acquire English or mainstream language due to either social expectation, I guess that children need more scaffolding to make sense of themselves and make sense of their world that they are experiencing in both languages. At the end of this article, the authors call for policy for bilingual and biliteracy education. I agree with their idea that bilingual/biliteracy policyat least may open an opportunity to revive meaningful and constructive discussions on language policy and education.

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