Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

62 Language Planning and Education
time a pupil’s other academic needs should receive attention, not least – given the
accumulation of evidence about its positive influence on the child’s future academic
prospects – the continued development of the L1.
3.2.3.5 Conclusion: the educational arguments around Proposition 227
In the course of the preceding discussion we have seen that none of the educational
assumptions underlying Proposition 227’s provisions are supported by the research
evidence. To summarise very briefly:
1. There is no backing for the ‘time-on-task’ principle. Time spent developing the
literacy skills in the L1 need not detract from the development of those same
skills in the L2.
2. There is no evidence that bilingual instruction is so burdensome that it
impedes the pupil’s acquisition of English. On the contrary, there is empirical
and theoretical support for the cognitive benefits of the additive bilingualism
that results when pupils continue to develop their L1 while learning an L2.
3. The idea that minority language pupils should be taught in English as early and
quickly as possible because younger learners pick up second languages more
readily is also not sustainable. First, the evidence on the age question is not
clear-cut: younger learners may have an advantage but only in certain areas of
second language acquisition. Second, there is a gap between premise and
conclusion that needs to be bridged by further argument. There are grounds,
in fact, for supposing that developing literacy skills in the L1 provides a good
foundation for these same skills in the L2.
4. The time taken to acquire academic skills in English is considerably longer
than that assumed in Proposition 227.
On the whole, then, theory and data point to the potential benefits of bilingual
education (BE). They are only potential, however, because BE can be well or poorly
delivered, and, as Cummins (1998: 3) has pointed out, it is no panacea for the
relative educational underperformance of certain categories of minority pupils, some
of whose complex causes may be found in the schooling process and others in a
disempowering environment beyond the school.
Finally, the fact that Proposition 227 was so solidly endorsed in the face of
unsupportive educational evidence leads one to suspect that the ideological and
political dimensions of the BE debate carry as much, if not more, weight than the
educational. It is, therefore, to these dimensions that we now turn.
3.3 THE POLITICS OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION IN THE
UNITED STATES
The successful passage of California’s Proposition 227 may be attributed, at least in
part, to the importance that bilingual education (BE) now assumes as a symbolic
issue in a wider language policy conflict. As already noted, this is sometimes