From ESL to Dual Language Model: Skipping Bilingual Education

• In Event: Not all Bilingual Education Policies are the Same: Learning from History to Build the Future

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
Indiana Dual language bilingual education (DLBE) has rapidly scaled with little forethought to emergent bilinguals (EBs). With such intense scaling and little history of bilingual education, educators privilege elective English-monolingual students, crowding out EBs for whom bilingual education was founded. To address this DLBE gentrification dilemma (Valdez et. al, 2016), the study’s objectives are to 1) analyze the language policy orientations of key Indiana policies as enacted by stakeholders; 2) describe and analyze how bilingual advocates disrupted DLBE gentrification; and 3) provide implications for forming DLBE programs in new immigrant destination states who have “skipped the step” of bilingual education.

Theoretical Framework
This study is theorized through Machin’s (2013) critical discourse framework to examine how policy enactors combined, obscured, highlighted and deleted elements of language access/opportunities for EBs within DLBE. Machin’s framework addresses how textual or spoken policies can abstract agents through 1) deletion of agents; 2) substitution of one agent or outcome for another; 3) addition of elements and/or agents and 4) evaluation or judging agents or outcomes. Authors (2024) add separation, where policies are disentangled, creating disruptive reflexivity within language policies.

Methods
This study is grounded in critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 203; Machin, 2013) as nested within critical language policy (Liddicoat, 2013). Language is a method for distributing power and tracing its content, format, production/reproduction can identify how actors are discursively positioned (Authors, 2024).

Data Sources/Analysis
Data represent two main sources: Written text and spoken word as each represent forms of language policy. Textual data includes 1) Indiana Dual language pilot program, Indiana Code § 20-20-41 (2015); 2) Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) DLBE descriptions on state websites; 3) IDOE application for DLBE funding. Spoken sources include 1) Senate and House testimony from the DLBE pilot bill adoption; and 2) web meetings with Indiana’s DLBE directors. Transcripts from policy texts and policy actors’ discussions were coded and analyzed using Machin’s framework.

Results
Textual analysis demonstrates multiple forms of deletion where the student beneficiaries of the DLBE program were not articulated. In the legislative description of Indiana DLBE pilot program and department of education papers, the agents identified are those responsible for programming including the state board of education, department of education (IDOE), and school districts with the outcomes being biliteracy and the seal of biliteracy. Text is also evaluative as the DLBE pilot must be “certain foreign languages” with the IDOE privileging Chinese, Spanish, or French (Indiana Department of Education, 2024).

Spoken analysis from legislators demonstrates deletion where the focus extends from the outcomes of biliteracy to augmenting critical languages such as Chinese; a form of addition/amplification. Legislators and DLBE-administrators rearticulated the economic benefits of bilingualism, another form of addition but coupled with deletion as target students of DLBE are not stated/centered. DLBE-directors used addition, where EBs are identified as explicit DLBE-students, grounded in language rights.

Scholarly Significance
Through a policy separation exercise, local language-policy implementers can disentangle the agents and outcomes of DLBE-programming, ensuring that EBs are centered.

Author

• Trish Morita-Mullaney, Purdue University