from Part III - Norms, Literacy and Education
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2021
This chapter frames bilingual education in a social theoretical perspective on standard languages and standardization that shape the use of more than one language in education and in society. Bilingual education offers a rich area in which to investigate the tensions surrounding standard language, standardization and institutionalized normativity in multilingual contexts. We present the case of bilingual education in the USA, where English language dominance has a long and contentious history. A civil rights and social justice issue in the 1960s and 1970s, a way of transitioning immigrant and minority language children into English-only instruction in the 1980s and an increasing ‘problem’ for standardized assessment and racialized nativist politics since the 1990s, bilingual education remains a highly contested and politicized issue, grounded in conflicting notions of language-as-problem, language-as-right and language-as-resource. We focus on the layered historicity of bilingual education in California, where bilingual education has recently come to evoke a multilingual future in which mobility and global identity figure prominently for all. In this age of globalization, we examine some key questions raised at the intersection of language educational issues, the growing demands of a global economy and the future of bilingual and multilingual education in neoliberal times.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.