A few days ago, I came across this article, New Brief: Bilingual Paraprofessionals and the Bilingual Teacher Shortage, about supporting the growing linguistic diversity in the U.S. by encouraging an increase in bilingual educators.
What I like: I agree with the article's assertion that minority language children benefit the most from bilingual programs, rather than English-only. I also agree there aren't enough bilingual educators to provide the instruction for all those students. Paraprofessionals are more likely to be bilingual than teachers, so encouraging more of those individuals to seek their teaching license, and making the process more straightforward, seems like a decent place to start. After graduating from undergrad, I worked as a paraprofessional (though our title was the slightly loftier 'Associate Educator') at an elementary school with heritage literacy programming. A large portion of the school's population spoke Spanish as a first language, and kindergarten through grade 4 provided reading instruction in Spanish, which were the classes in which most of my time was spent. A number of the AEs were simultaneously working on education degrees, and had I not decided to pursue my doctorate in Bilingualism and SLA, I may have taken the same path. Where I'm ambivalent: I understand they're focusing on one particular issue for the article (dearth of bilingual teachers), but it really takes a 3-part (at least?) effort to support DLLs: yes, the teachers to instruct them, but also the minority language materials with which to instruct them, as well as the resources (read: $$) for schools to afford curricula in multiple languages plus other bilingual supporting materials. Any one of those elements on its own is important, but without the other two, its impact is pretty limited. Without instruction materials, bilingual educators are stuck playing the role of mediator or translator, which provides valuable transitional support to students but doesn't result in strong bilingual maintenance. And the materials ought to be thoughtfully designed and culturally appropriate, not just quick translations of standard English curricula. Of course, even if the materials exist, they don't do anyone much good if schools don't have the resources to purchase and implement them, plus support them with additional media (books, audio, video). Furthermore (see, I figured there would be more than three parts), with all those pieces in place, community attitude towards additive bilingualism needs to be strong and positive, or the children will pick up on the negativity directed towards their minority language and distance themselves from it no matter what the school tries to promote. In turn, attitude change requires good research, which needs to be actively promoted (which is part of why I co-founded RUBilingual) to support bilingual families from within and tear down prejudices from without. All of the above is super challenging, but even still is infinitely easier for a language like Spanish, given its huge and growing population of speakers in the U.S. The struggle is even greater for less represented minority languages, especially if their speakers are spread from district to district and therefore wouldn't fill their own class. Dual immersion education would be great in those instances (for the heritage speakers close enough to attend), but requires sufficient interest in the language from English monolinguals (and other non-speakers). Aside from encouraging communities of like-language speakers to cluster together (which opens up its own can of worms regarding self-segregation), it's hard to imagine how schools can accommodate the needs of so many speakers of so many disparate languages. I don't blame the article for highlighting only one element of the puzzle, because thinking of all the variables can be overwhelming. Truly equitable education for students of all language backgrounds is a difficult prospect, but it's worth fighting for.
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AuthorThis is a place where I record thoughts on second language research and pedagogical theory Archives
June 2019
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