The Deliverance of Bilingual Education: Translanguaging

Educating Children in a Sheltered Environment

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The Rise & Fall

Of Bilingual

Education


By: Jenni Vinson (2012)

From the fruits of the strife of the Civil Rights Movement came the Johnsonion concept of Title 1 which lead to the ability of Hispanic minorities developing Bilingual Education to allow children whose first language was Spanish an environment to learn English.

Educators required special instruction and certification in the teaching of Bilingual Education. An industry arose from the concept.

As time past, some students were designated as being in need of Bilingual Education services and instruction simply if they had a Hispanic surname and despite of their person level of proficiency in English. Some cases involved students who had limited -to- no proficiency with Spanish who were still places in Bilingual instruction classes.

As a result of the flexible or eroded fidelity to the primary concept of Bilingual Education, Hispanic parents, themselves, advocated to remove their children from the program preferring that their children be allowed an opportunity to enter into mainstream classes.

Politicians, fueled bilingual education's rejection by the parents, began to advocate for an "English Only" academic structure for the U.S. public school system.

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The History Of Bilingual Education In The United States

Nieto, D. (2009). A brief history of bilingual education in the United States. Perspectives On Urban Education (Spring), 61-72.

Abstract:In the history of the United States of America, multilingual communities have subsisted side by side. Among the many languages spoken throughout the country, we could mention first all the original Native American languages and then a multitude of languages that immigrants from all over the world have brought into the country. Together with English, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese are just some of the more than two hundred languages that have been spoken in the United States. As James Crawford (2004) has noted, “Language diversity in North America has ebbed and flowed, reaching its lowest level in the mid-20th century. But it has existed in every era, since long before the United States constituted itself as a nation” (p. 59).

Full pdf:  http://www.urbanedjournal.org/sites/urbanedjournal.org/files/pdf_archive/61-72--Nieto.pdf

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"English Only":

   Why Not??

Moving forward into this discussion, we find that an "English Only" environment is impossible to achieve within the U.S. public school system because we have a constant flow of immigrants who arrive on the steps of U.S. schools daily and many of these students are in need of being taught English.

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Debate Over Eradicated Bilingual Education Program

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As Bilingual Education is fading into the pages of academic history,

we have an opportunity to conceptualize, to dream of the potential

and to develop what is to come. Let us now examine the future......