Chapter 6: Bilingual Education

What does the Research Say?

Politicians are not usually in agreement about what to do with English Learners in their school systems; and according to Cummins, they figure they have enough experiential evidence to make their decisions. Where there have been many studies about education bilinguals, from all over the world, and a few theories about what is best for the students, politicians have rarely used the results of research that has tested the theoretical hypotheses against all the different studies. Chapter 6 relates the theories with types of bilingual education programs and the studies made about these programs, to find the methods that most researchers (and fewer policy makers) have discovered work best.

Types of Bilingual Education Programs

In Bilingual Education, two (or more) languages of instruction during parts of the student's school career. This is not the same as teaching three years of high school Spanish to English speakers, where Spanish is the subject being taught, not (necessarily) the language of instruction.According to Cummins, this can be interpreted in two ways:

• The method is used as a means by which other educational goals are achieved. Students are often taught in bilingual classes only up to the point where they are deemed able to participate in regular classes with their peers. The bilinguaal education is used to provide a transition from L1 to L2. Real proficiency in L2 is expected to develop while the student uses it in regular classes along with L2-speaking peers.
• In some bilingual programs, however, bilingual proficiency is the goal, rather than the means. Students are expected to become academically proficient in both (or all three) languages. These programs are often found in two types:
  1. Second language immersion, such as French programs taught in Canada, where students may be taught entirely in French for the first few classes, gradually moving toward 50% English and 50% French as the language of instruction of all subjects.
  2. Dual language (two-way) bilingual programs, where students with two different L1s are taught in each other's languages, sometimes starting with about 90% in one language and sometimes 50/50, with perhaps the one language in the morning and the other in the afternoon.
  Thus the students gain academic language proficiency in both languages.

Typologies of bilingual education programs

Different researchers have classified programs according to "goals, status of the student group... , proportions of instructional time through each language, sociolinguistic and sociopolitical situation in the immediate community and wider society." (Cummins, pp 160-161) Cummins divides these into five types, based on the status of the L1 and L2:

• Type I use indigenous or Native languages as the medium of instruction, often aiming at reviving and revitalizing languages that have been endangered through earlier abusive educational programs . Besides in the US and Canada, these can be found with Maoris in New Zealand and other similar countries.
• Type II use a national minority language, like Welsh in Wales (which might also be motivated as a Type I program; French, German or Italian in Switzerland; Swedish in Finland, and Basque in Spain.
  
• Type III use international minority languages used by relatively recent immigrants to a country. These are common in places like the Netherlands and Sweden, as well as the U.S., and are mostly used to transition students into the dominant language. In some case, Type II and III merge, as with Spanish/English schools in the U.S.
  
• Type IV are bilingual/bicultural programs for the deaf or hard-of-hearing.
  
• Type V are for majority/dominant group students, who can see an advantage becoming bilingual. These include the French immersion programs for English speakers (the already bilingual English/Swedish daughter of friends in Montreal enjoyed participating in such a program) as well as some duo-language programs in the U.S.
  

Theories of bilingual education

There seem to be four major theories about bilingual education. The first two are favored by policy makers who oppose comprehensive bilingual education, while the last two are based on cognitive theory, and are favored by Cummins:

1. Linguistic Mismatch: where there is considered to be a mismatch between a student's L1 (and culture) and the language and culture of the school, the student is instructed in the L2 to minimize or erase the mismatch, assuming that students would encounter academic difficulties because of a mismatch. (Cummins, p. 158.) Cummins dismisses this assumption with short shrift later:

   While the claim that children cannot learn through a language they do not understand has been persuasive to many policy-makers and educatiors (and, in fact, underlies the quick-exit transitional focus of most U.S. bilingual education), it ...fails to account either for the success of English background children in ... dual language programs...
   (Cummins, p. 164.)

2. Maximum Exposure: students learn the L2 best by being completely immersed in it as soon as possible, providing maximum "time on task" for learning English, and leaving the L1 for home use alone. This is the method that has been taught in schools for Native Americans here, as well as similar schools in many other countries where a native population was dominated by another (as discussed in my blog post about Chapter I,) where children were kept in boarding schools in an attempt to "save them from their heathen culture." Cummins quotes several claims that purport to prove that time on task learning the predominant language (and this means, in particular, the spoken language) is the greatest predictor of learning this language, claiming that bilingual education spends too little time teaching English. (Cummins, p 163)
3. Additive Bilingualism Enrichment Principle: bilingual students gain cognitive skills from their bilingualism, including learning a third language faster.
   
4. Linguistic Interdependence (or Common Underlying Proficiency) Principle: cognitive skills are independent of the language being spoken (i.e. it doesn't matter what language you speak to learn to drive a car) so the cognitive skills of language learning are interdependent on each other. (Cummins, p. 159.)
   

These last two theories are discussed and supported in the rest of the chapter, so I will cover them in the next blog post.