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When bilingual teachers are first hired, many say they are pressured to teach material only in English (Menken, 2008). Removing instruction in a child’s native language is not likely to improve scores on English standardized tests (Rolstad, Mahoney, & Glass, 2005), and long term, English-Only instruction reduces academic success and reduces graduation rates (Iddings, Combs, & Moll, 2012). This chapter looks at bilingual classrooms in a Texas school district, through classroom observations, interviews, and a large-scale survey seeking to answer the question, what do officially bilingual classrooms look like when they operate monolingually? Results showed that administrators exerted pressure, and teachers used methods they expected not to work. Some bilingual classrooms had teachers who either could not speak Spanish, or chose not to. Because classrooms operated without the legally required amount of first-language instruction, the district’s “bilingual” programs undermined accountability data while harming emergent bilinguals. Teacher educators have not prepared bilingual teachers for the reality of anti-bilingual schools. New teachers need to know how to not only implement research-based instruction but also defend their instructional choices. Wherever lawmakers, agencies, and administrators have allowed transitional bilingual programs to become de facto monolingual, there may be a role for colleges of education to play, monitoring, assisting, and, if necessary, publicizing lack of compliance. Study findings are limited to one specific district; even in districts with similar phenomena, the manner in which a bilingual program ceases to be bilingual will vary substantially.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss issues of contemporary language conflict in educational contexts.

This is a conceptual paper which examines current educational practices and policies through the lens of linguistic hegemony.

The authors identify three primary areas in which linguistic hegemony persists at present, including English-only policies, varied perspectives on language difference and harsh graduation mandates.

The authors extend upon Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemonic culture as well as Robert Phillipson’s concept of linguistic imperialism in identifying current instances of linguistic hegemony in educational policies and practices throughout the USA.

Briefly defines national origin discrimination before covering the guidelines of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Considers the range of National origin Discrimination including height and weight requirements, accent discrimination, English only rules, harassment, immigration‐related practices and occupation qualifications. Provides some statistics on the current position and gives some recommendations for employers. Concludes that this needs addressing and the demographics suggest that could bcome a growing problem.

Little research has been done exploring the nature of multilingual students who are not categorized as English language learners (ELLs) in English language arts (ELA) classes. This study about a group of multilingual girls in an ELA class led by a monolingual white teacher aims to show how, when a teacher makes space for translanguaging practices in ELA, multilingual students disrupt norms of English only.

The authors use reconstructive discourse analysis to understand translanguaging across a variety of linguistic productions for a group of four focal students. Data sources include fieldnotes from 29 classroom observations, writing samples and process documents and 8.5 h of recorded classroom discourse.

Students used multilingualism across a variety of discourse modes, frequently in spoken language and rarely in written work. Translanguaging was most present in small-group peer talk structures, where students did relationship building, generated ideas for writing and managed their writing agendas, including feelings about writing. In addition, Spanish served as “elevated vocabulary” in writing. Across discourse modes, translanguaging served to develop academic proficiency in writing.

The authors proposed a more expansive approach to data analysis in English-mostly cases – i.e. environments shaped by multilingual students in monolingual school contexts – to argue for anti-deficit approaches to literacy development for multilingual students. Analyzing classroom talk alongside literacy allows for a more nuanced understanding of translanguaging practices in academic writing. They also show how even monolingual teachers can disrupt monolingual hegemony in ELA classrooms with high populations of multilingual students.

The main purpose is to investigate what resources young emergent bilinguals use to communicate a multimodal response to children’s literature. In particular, attention is paid to the ways students translanguage as part of the learning process.

An ethnography-in-education approach was used to capture the social and cultural aspects of literacy learning in an English-only context. A multimodal transcript analysis was applied to video-recorded data as a method for examining semiotic resources and modes of learning.

The results revealed that students used technology, paper-based resources and peers to construct meaning relative to books. Experimentation or play with the affordances of the tablet computer served as avenues to determine the agentive selection of resources. As students wrestled with constructing meaning, they gathered multiple perspectives from peers and children’s literature to involve symbols and representations in their texts. Signs, multiple language forms and meaning came together for the social shaping of situated perspectives.

This study addresses the call for educators to engage in multiliterate, multimodal practices with young learners in the contexts of classrooms. It provides insight into the need to create multilingual learning spaces where translanguaging freely occurs and the meaningful ways early childhood learners use technology. To fully understand what emergent bilinguals know and can do, they must be afforded a variety of semiotic resources at school.

In this chapter, the author provides empirical research that supports the implementation of DLPs as programs that provide cogitative learning, high academic achievement, and the opportunity to be competitive in a global economy for all students – including culturally and linguistically diverse students – in order to achieve education equity. The author utilizes Arizona as an example of education policy that excludes and further marginalizes language minority students by requiring English proficiency as a requirement to be part of Dual Language Programs (DLPs). Furthermore, the author frames the current education climate and language policy affecting DLPs through an Interest Convergence theoretical lens.

This chapter discusses a family writing project that a third and fourth grade English Language Development (ELD) teacher created with and for her students and families. The project took place within a state with English-only mandates, restrictive curriculum, and harsh anti-immigrant politics. The author outlines the ways that the project worked to disrupt the restrictive policies to honor and celebrate the cultures, languages, and ways of knowing and students and families by inviting them to write and share stories from their lived experiences.

Over the course of several decades, the field of bilingual special education has found much support in the reform movement that has become known as multicultural education. Born out of the 1960s civil rights movement (Mclaren & Muñoz, 2000), multicultural education “is a field in education that is dedicated to equal opportunity for all students. Even groups who appear to be monocultural are diverse in regards to class, gender, and language” (Ooka Pang, 2005, p. 213). Multicultural education “assumes that race, ethnicity, culture, and social class are salient parts of U.S. society. It also assumes that ethnic and cultural diversity enriches the nation and increases the ways in which its citizens can perceive and solve personal and public problems” (Banks, 2002, p. 1). Thus, multicultural education supports the call for bilingual special education in teacher preparation and in schools. For special educators, in particular, understanding the link between exceptionalities and cultural diversity is fundamental to their professional role (Hallahan et al., 2009). In the context of a multilingual and multicultural country, such as the United States, bilingual special education is no doubt the best way to ensure that a subgroup of our population (i.e., bilingual exceptional children) has real opportunities to succeed. A major concern for any educator, but especially for bilingual special educators who value and seek to implement multicultural education, is to ensure that bilingual exceptional learners are not placed at a disadvantage because of their linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Here the term culture encompasses all the various aspects (subcultures) that contribute to define an individual. These are race, ethnicity, language, exceptionality, sexual orientation, gender, religion, socioeconomic background, and age.

Observes that, in some public schools in the USA, dual language instead of English only is being promoted as a plus and not the drawback it was once seen to be. Stresses there is still opposition to dual language or other languages being used in the US. Reckons that educated parents are the likeliest to seek dual‐language education for their children. Uses tables and figures to show the dual language options and variances. Concludes that there is potential for two‐way immersion to expand.

With the increasing number of online multilingual resources, cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) has drawn much attention from the information retrieval (IR) research community. However, few studies have examined how and why multilingual searchers seek information in two or more languages, specifically how they switch and mix language in queries to get satisfying results. The purpose of this paper is to focus on Chinese–English bilinguals’ intra-sentential code-switching behaviors in online searches. The scenarios and reasons of code-switching, factors that may affect code-switching, the patterns of mixed language query formulation and reformulation and how current IR systems and other search tools can facilitate such information needs were examined.

In-depth semi-structured interviews were used as the research method. In total, 30 participants were recruited based on their English proficiency, location and profession, using a purposive sampling method.

Four scenarios and four reasons for using Chinese–English mixed language queries to cover information needs were identified, and results suggest that linguistic and cultural/social factors are of equivalent importance in code-switching behaviors. English terms and Chinese terms in queries play different roles in searches, and mixed language queries are irreplaceable by either single language queries or other search facilitating features. Findings also suggest current search engines and tools need greater emphasis in the user interface and more user education is required.

This study presents a qualitative analysis of bilinguals’ code-switching behaviors in online searches. Findings are expected to advance the theoretical understanding of bilingual users’ search strategies and interactions with IR systems, and provide insights for designing more effective IR systems and tools to discover multilingual online resources, including cross-language controlled vocabularies, personalized CLIR tools and mixed language query assistants.