Shifting Instructional Ideologies in Bilingual and ESL Teacher Preparation: Language, Culture, and Content Deep in the Heart of Texas

• In Event: 31.049 - The South Is Different: Preparing Teachers to Work With English Learners in the Southeastern United States

Abstract

While the K-12 education of English learner (EL) students has progressed greatly in the 40 years since Lau and Castañeda, EL students’ academic achievement continues to lag far behind (Fry, 2008), especially by the secondary grades. Often, primary language (bilingual) instruction in the elementary grades is offered up as a panacea to ‘solve’ the problem of relatively low English learner (EL) achievement; Texas provides a unique opportunity to examine the processes of both bilingual and content-based ESL teacher preparation contexts. With its long history of bilingualism and biculturalism in the western panhandle, Rio Grande Valley and border areas, Texas is squarely situated in the Southwest; at the same time, however, the central and east Texas regions are squarely situated in the new immigrant diaspora currently shaping education in much of the Southeast. Fifteen percent of students in Texas are EL identified, however they are not evenly distributed across the states; longstanding bilingual communities enroll the vast majority of these students. For example, Houston, Dallas and Forth Worth school districts alone enroll over half of Texas EL students (Dalton, Sable, & Hoffman, 2006). Students and educators in these districts have long histories of bilingual and ESL language instruction, while many of their peers in rural and suburban districts throughout the state struggle to address many of the pedagogical quandaries that currently plague the new Latino south (Colomer & Harklau, 2009; Marrow, 2011). The key difference in the Texas context has to do with the long history of bilingual and EL education in its urban centers; what is often hidden in this process is the struggles facing many of the new destination Texas districts and the teacher preparation programs that produce their teachers. ESL and bilingual teacher preparation in the Texas context thus must prepare pre-service teachers to both engage in and build upon longstanding bilingual programs as well as meet the needs of EL students through content-based ESL instruction in what are essentially new immigrant destinations.

Our work in Texas teacher preparation thus must address both contexts. We argue however that the linguistic foundation required of all Texas certification candidates to work with EL students in the content areas is insufficient to bridge the EL achievement gap. Rather, we build on prior research examining the tensions experienced by both mainstream and ESL certified teachers, to meet the linguistic, academic and social needs of the growing EL population simultaneously (Hamann, 2008; Hamann & Reeves, 2013) to incorporate a stronger core of what Bunch (2013) terms Pedagogical Language Knowledge, the intersection of teachers’ linguistic and content area knowledge. In the Texas context this poses unique challenges as we simultaneously address primary language content area development and strategies to counter new destination districts’ predisposition to a pre-Lau sink-or-swim instructional model.

Author

• Rebecca M. Callahan, The University of Texas - Austin