Research Priorities in Bilingual Education

Abstract

The domain of bilingual education is unusually broad, as it encompasses all the dimensions of monolingual education, with the added aspect of the use of two languages as media of instruction. Making matters even more complex, the populations served by bilingual education in the United States differ significantly in character, in educational needs, and in corresponding use of bilingual instruction. For one group, the limitedand non-Englishspeaking (LES/NES) minority children who are dominant in their home language, bilingual education is viewed as necessary for academic survival-to ensure students' conceptual growth and to facilitate the learning of English. For the second group, the balanced-bilingual-linguistic-minority population (those who may have once been LES/NES but who have reached a level of English proficiency equivalent to that of their first language), bilingual education is seen as providing a means for maintaining continued development of the student's home language, thereby facilitating foreign study required in later school years, as well as providing continuity between home and school. For the third group, the English-dominant-linguistic-minority students (those students who may have once been dominant in their home language but who have since lost much of it, or who never acquired the l nguage of their parents and grandparnts), bilingual education is a vehicle to the reacquisition and revitalization of their home language and culture. For the fourth group, the native-English-speaking-linguistic-majority group students (the Anglo-Americans, and Black Americans in our schools), bilingual education is seen as an enrichment of the children's educational experience by providing them exposure to another language and culture early in life. The past decade of discussion and debate has made clear the need for bilingual education felt by each group. For this brief paper, however, the focus is on the research needs in bilingual education for only one of the groups; the limitedand