Reframing language allocation policy in dual language bilingual education

Abstract

This article addresses language allocation policies in what is increasingly called “Dual Language Education” (DLE) in the U.S., offering a challenge to the strict language separation policies in those programs and a proposal for flexibility that transforms them into “Dual Language Bilingual Education” (DLBE). The article offers a historical review of policies and practices in bilingual education and the ways in which the present language policies for DLE have come about. It then provides a critical assessment of those policies, which focus on teaching two languages, rather than educating students bilingually. We argue that the rigid language allocation policies of DLE ignore the sociolinguistic realities of bilingual learning for all students, especially for language-minoritized bilingual students. The main part of the article sets forth a new alternative policy proposal for language allocation that more coherently reflects the dynamic nature of bilingualism and reclaims the criticality of bilingual education and its social justice purpose. The proposal embodies an understanding of bilingual education through a translanguaging lens to open up spaces where students develop not only their bilingualism and biliteracy, but also a criticality that resists social arrangements of language normativity that differentiate and exclude. The translanguaging allocation policy proposed here works with the existing spaces for English and the Language Other than English, but introduces three components that offer the flexibility and criticality needed to educate bilingual students for the future: (1) translanguaging documentation; (2) translanguaging rings; and (3) translanguaging transformative spaces.

Acknowledgments

This article is a result of work and dialogue over the course of a year with the CUNY-NYSIEB team, some of whom read and commented on an earlier draft of this paper. For their reading and advice, we thank CUNY-NYSIEB Team members Gladys Aponte, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, Kathryn Carpenter, María Cioè-Peña, Brian Collins, Ivana Espinet, Cecilia Espinosa, Luis Guzmán Valerio, Dina López, Meral Kaya, Erin Kearney, Tatyana Kleyn, Kate Menken, Kate Mahoney, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, Kate Seltzer, and Sara Vogel. We thank especially Ricardo Otheguy who gave us valuable comments and suggested revisions. We also thank the anonymous reviewers. To learn more about CUNY-NYSIEB, go to www. cuny-nysieb.org.

Notes

¹ Notice that we are adopting here the translanguaging perspective offered in Otheguy, García & Reid (2015) that distinguishes between the internal linguistic system of the bilingual and the externally normed concept of named languages. Unlike MacSwan (2017), we do not believe that bilinguals have two compartmentalized linguistic systems that correspond to two named languages. We adhere here to the idea that the linguistic system of the bilingual does not neatly correspond to the categories of named languages and that when the bilingual chooses what is said to be one or two named languages, they are responding to external social factors.

² The conceptualization of the translanguaging allocation policy emerged from a discussion between Sánchez, García and Solorza about the Translanguaging Unit Plans being developed by Solorza and his team: Gladys Aponte, Tim Becker, Tess Leverenz, and Bianca Frías (Solorza et al., forthcoming).