Language Wars: The Ideological Dimensions of the Debates on Bilingual Education

Abstract

The debates over the future of bilingual education call for conceptual frameworks that can illuminate the variety of issues that are implicated in those debates. Building from the fields of sociology of language, language policy, and language ideology, a conceptual framework is presented and employed in the analysis of the ideological debates, ocurring in Colorado and California. The analysis is concerned with the identification of different ideological positions regarding the value of bilingualism and bilingual education, the Spanish language, and the linguistic capital of working-class Latinoimmigrant families. The debates are seen as competition for value between different constituencies that take place through the manipulation of symbolic assets such as language(s), and in which Latino parents are displaced from their position as legitimate participants in their children’s education through the devaluing of their linguistic capital.The debates over the future of bilingual education call for conceptual frameworks that can illuminate the variety of issues that are implicated in those debates. Building from the fields of sociology of language, language policy, and language ideology, a conceptual framework is presented and employed in the analysis of the ideological debates, ocurring in Colorado and California. The analysis is concerned with the identification of different ideological positions regarding the value of bilingualism and bilingual education, the Spanish language, and the linguistic capital of working-class Latinoimmigrant families. The debates are seen as competition for value between different constituencies that take place through the manipulation of symbolic assets such as language(s), and in which Latino parents are displaced from their position as legitimate participants in their children’s education through the devaluing of their linguistic capital.