Reading research and bilingual education

Last week I gave a talk at the National Association for Bilingual Conference (NABE).

There were three principal points I tried to make:

•We need to reframe the discussion about bilingual education and to advocate for long-term bilingual education for all, not just for English Leaners (ELs; or if you prefer, Multi-lingual learners, MLs; or Emergent bilinguals, EBs).

•We need to put literacy instruction on a sounder footing in order to help put bilingual education on a sounder footing.

•Both of these will benefit students, teachers, and the society as a whole.

For me the highlight of my talk came after I’d finished, when a gentleman I didn’t recognize, sitting in the middle of the room and paying close attention throughout my talk, posed a question. I found out later he was one of the premier advocates for bilingual education in the latter half of the 20th century and early years of the 21st and had just received a great honor from NABE.

He said the information I presented was all new to him. He had never heard it before and thought it was very important. He said that when he was involved in bilingual education starting in the 1960s and 1970s, it was all Cummins and Krashen. Cummins and Krashen all the time. He’d never heard what I talked about, and he said he was wondering—as he looked around the room—whether “the young folks know this.” There was silence for a couple of beats. Then one of “young folks” sitting in the front and off to one side said he thought teachers would be interested in knowing the information I presented about what needed to happen in the brain to enable literacy.

It was an astonishing moment, partly because I felt he vindicated my belief that if bilingual education advocates paid more attention to what we know from reading research, we could improve bilingual education practices and outcomes. Indeed, we could improve outcomes for ELs (MLs, EBs), regardless of language program.

It was also astonishing because up until that very moment, the only reaction I’d received from bilingual education/English Learner advocates over the past few years has, with a few exceptions, ranged from disbelief to dismissal to basically being ignored, witness my recent unsuccessful attempts to engage the CABE CEO.

Here’s a brief(ish) summary of my talk. Below is a link to the powerpoint.

Bilingual education has been part of the American educational landscape since before the U.S. was the U.S. With the exception of the years during and after World War I, there has always been bilingual education on the North American continent. The height of participation came around 1900 when approximately 6% of the school-aged population was in some form of bilingual education intended to promote bilingualism (biliteracy too, probably, but hard to tell precisely).

Today, at most 3% of students are in programs designed to promote bilingualism and biliteracy; at most 1% of high school students score a 4 or 5 on a foreign language AP test. Educator Clayton Lewis called this “monolingual myopia,” writing that “schools and colleges are failing America’s young if they let students slip through their education in an English cocoon.”

The research on bilingual education is complicated and difficult to summarize simply. Most of research, and all have the controversy, has been with ELs, although there’s been research with majority language-speakers, showing positive effects on second language development, cross-ethic relations, and other positive outcomes. I didn’t review this research during my presentation, but it’s out there.

Regardless, it is clear—and I didn’t have to press this point with my audience—that bilingualism and biliteracy are good things. “Superpower” is the favored term at these gathering. Bilingualism provides economic, social, intellectual, cultural, and vocational benefits to individuals and the society. So my first point was that we need to reframe the conversation around the benefits of bilingualism for all and the role schools can and should play in promoting this goal.

My concern throughout my career and in this particular presentation has been mostly with ELs. These students have not always been well-served in their school programs, whether English-only or bilingual. There are many reasons for why too many of these students not reaching their academic and vocational potentials. I believe an important factors is a poor approach to literacy instruction in either language, the students’ first one or English.

I presented two sets of findings: (1) short-term bilingual education (aka transitional, generally for 2-4 years) and (2) long-term (variously called developmental, two-way, or dual language) bilingual education.

Short-term bilingual education research has generally found a modest positive effect on English language and literacy. But the results are highly variable, meaning it’s hard to predict what the results will be of a short-term bilingual program. Positive effects on Spanish (the most common non-English language in the U.S. and, not surprisingly, in U.S. bilingual research) are typical, again not surprisingly, but also not trivial. If short term bilingual education achieves the same effects in English (although remember effects vary considerably), but helps maintain and develop the home language, even if modestly, that’s net plus.

Long-term bilingual education research is more sparse, but I believe more significant. It points to long-term benefits in terms of English language achievement. In the most significant study to date, Ilana Umansky and Sean Reardon reported that Spanish-speaking ELs in English immersion gained English language proficiency more rapidly than students in bilingual education through elementary school, but in middle school, the rates of proficiency gains switched. By the end of high school, approximately 7% more ELs in long-term bilingual education, compared to students in either English immersion or short-term bilingual education, had gained English proficiency.

However, regardless of language program, fewer than half of the students attained English proficiency before 6th grade. All had begun school in the district as kindergartners, meaning that over half were long-term English learners, or LTELs, defined as students who have been enrolled in a U.S. school for six years or more and have not been reclassified as fluent English proficient.

I know colleagues who are not alarmed by this, saying, there’s nothing particularly magical about reclassifying in fewer than 6 years. Some say LTELs is a derisive term (a “deficit view”), and we should refer to these students as “mature” English Learners. Really? As if that would change anything that actually matters. Call them what you will, but the Regional Educational Laboratory West at WestEd provides a harsh reality check, reporting that these students “are usually struggling academically due to their limited literacy skills in English.”

And, indeed, if we look at the breakdown (which you can see in the powerpoint) of what the principal obstacles are to these students’ achieving full English proficiency, it’s literacy. Even more so, it’s academic literacy.

Many factors are involved in these students’ troubling academic trajectories, but one clear response must be to examine deeply how literacy is taught to English Learners, whether in bilingual education or English medium instruction. Here’s where findings from reading research must come in.

As I’ve pointed out before, for reasons that are hard to fathom, bilingual education and English Learner advocates are profoundly resistant to taking into account what reading research has discovered about what needs to happen to support and promote students’ literacy acquisition and development. And I mean reading research on all sorts of students, not just English speakers and not just monolingual learners as is sometimes incorrectly claimed.

There is a diverse national and world-wide literature to draw on, with students learning to read in different languages and in their first or additional languages. This is not a narrow research literature, although many of our EL advocate colleagues see it from an extremely narrow lens that fails to consider much that is highly relevant to the students they presumably champion.

(Btw, I am so grateful for the many thoughtful comments to that post and apologize for not having responded to all. I will try to work my way through them, but pls know how much I appreciate the thoughts that have been shared.)

Brain, classroom, and intervention research have found that all students essentially need very similar instruction.

I didn’t think to say this then, but I’ll say it here: “All students essentially need very similar instruction” does NOT mean one-size-fits-all, just as one size of shoe doesn’t fit all feet or one size of house doesn’t fit all individuals, families, or groupings. That is a silly canard advanced by those who do not understand the research. There is a commonality of fundamental elements—in shoes, houses, and reading instruction—but with considerable variability depending on individuals and circumstances.

The fundamental difference between teaching reading to someone who knows the language they’re learning to read in and someone who is simultaneously learning the language as they’re learning to become literate is that if you’re learning the language as you’re learning to read it, you need additional instruction and support to learn the language itself in addition to learning how to read (and write) it. That’s a big difference, for sure, but it does not mean there is something fundamentally different about learning to read a language you’re learning and one you already know. It just (or actually “just”) means there’s a lot more to learn, and it’s harder, if you’re learning to read in a language you’re simultaneously learning to speak and understand.

BUT THE SAME THINGS NEED TO HAPPEN: Fundamentally, connecting the sounds of the language (the phonology) to its written representation (the orthography) then connecting that connection to how the language conveys meaning (the language’s semantic system, which is a whole bunch of things, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, pragmatics/discourse, and probably some things I’m forgetting). This phonology-orthography-semantics “brain circuit,” or (in my layperson’s term) “three-legged stool,” of literacy is fundamental for all literacy acquisition, and this knowledge is foundational for anyone purporting to be a professional reading teacher to anyone.

My bottom line point in this regard was that if we could help teachers who teach English Learners, whether in bilingual programs or in English medium, to understand this and be able to enact this, my guess (or hypothesis if you want to be scientific) is that we could help make bilingual education, and the education of ELs more generally, considerably more successful than it currently is.

That gentleman at my session seemed to agree.

Here’s the link to the powerpoint of the session. You can watch in the “normal” mode, but you can get the full cinematic effect (animations and transitions) in presentation mode.

Bilingual Education in the United States: Past, Present, and Future

If you want a bit more on differences and similarities in how learning/teaching to read for students who know the language and learning/teaching to read for students simultaneously learning the language, see the powerpoint linked to a post from back in December, https://claudegoldenberg.substack.com/p/research-must-guide-how-we-teach. There’s some overlap with the “Bilingual Education….” presentation linked above, but it goes a bit deeper into the reading issues, addresses “What’s ‘Reading Science’ Got to Do with English Learners?” and some of the controversies introduced by EL advocates, and includes links to other resources online and in print.