Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

Educational and political dimensions of bilingual education 45
liberalism and restrictionism, the dominant tendency in US federal policy has been
assimilationist. With the adoption of Propositions 227 and 203, and the enactment
of the ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act, this seems to have become more pronounced:
English language acquisition is the top priority, the development of native (home)
language skills hardly features as an item of public debate.
A second trend, perhaps more positive, is that there have been moves recently
towards a greater diversity of programs for linguistic minority children. Thus, alongside
the growth in ‘structured English immersion’, there are increased numbers of
dual language (or ‘two-way bilingual’) programs on offer. It is to a description of
these program types, and to evaluation studies of their relative effectiveness, that we
now turn.
3.1.4 Types of bilingual education
We outline below the main types of educational program provided for LEP students
in the United States, 13 some of which are clearly bilingual and some quite evidently
not, the aim again being to provide background contextual information for the
discussion of bilingual education research in section 3.2.3.
Submersion (‘sink or swim’)
This approach can hardly be labelled a program type at all, for the LEP child is placed
in a mainstream classroom alongside native English-speaking children but given no
special assistance at all. Though this breaches the student’s civil rights under the 1974
Lau ruling, it remains a not uncommon practice in the United States. Gandara
(1999), for example, estimates that between 20–25 per cent of LEP students received
in California this form of instruction in 1997, a statistic consistent with Crawford’s
(1997: 18) figures from 1994–95 showing 23 per cent of LEP pupils in ‘sink or swim’
classes.
ESL (English as a Second Language)
ESL provision comes in various forms, which for convenience we may divide into
three categories: ESL pull-out, ESL-content, and ‘Structured English Immersion’.
• ESL pull-out: In this program type LEP pupils attend mainstream content subject
classes in English but are withdrawn for certain timetabled periods (of very
variable length) to receive specialised English as a second language teaching from
a trained instructor. Such programs are intended to offer temporary, short-term
support prior to full integration into mainstream classes. August and Hakuta
(1997) report that ESL and transitional bilingual education (see below) are the
two most common program types serving LEP pupils, which is consistent with
Crawford’s (1997: 17) statement that ‘ESL pull-out remains the program of choice
for many school districts’. Thomas and Collier (1997) concur, stating that ESL
pull-out was the most common program followed by students in their study (52
per cent of their sample).