Language policies in Puerto Rican higher education: conflicting assumptions of bilingualism

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the language policies at 38 institutions of higher education on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. As a commonwealth of the US, Spanish and English hold co-official status on Puerto Rico despite the fact that majority of islanders use Spanish as their first language. Given the colonial status of the island, English has held a privileged role in higher education where institutional policies have allowed professors to teach in English or Spanish. After a description of the language context of Puerto Rico, data is presented that used document analysis of university catalogues along with structured interviews with registrars’ offices from the majority of the island’s campuses. The findings describe varying levels of open-language policies, which the author argues can be beneficial to students and professors who are bilingual but a detriment to students who have yet to develop academic language proficiency in both languages. The findings further indicate that the majority of institutions have de facto open-language policies, which allow instructors to use textbooks largely published in English and present their lectures and assessments in Spanish or a mixture of Spanish and English.

KEYWORDS:

• Puerto Rico
• higher education
• bilingual education
• language policy
• translanguaging

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Juan Kuang Ortiz and Veronica Basch for their help with data collection as well as Astrid Sambolín Morales, Catherine Mazak and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier drafts.

Notes on contributor

Kevin S. Carroll is an associate professor at the University of Puerto Rico where teaches courses related to language policy and bilingualism. Kevin’s research interests focus on how language policy impacts translanguaging practices in multilingual educational environments. His research has primarily focused on the contexts of Aruba, Puerto Rico, the USA, and the United Arab Emirates.