Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

Educational and political dimensions of bilingual education 69
6. ‘Caste-like minorities’, according to Ogbu (1978), are the most powerless and subordinated
of minorities, and frequently stigmatised by the dominant majority population.
‘Immigrant minorities’ (Ogbu 1978) are also subordinate and of low status but tend not to
have internalised attributions of inferiority and have, as a result, greater self-confidence.
‘Autonomous minorities’, finally, have a well-developed sense of their cultural identity, and are
not considered either by themselves or the dominant majority as a subordinate group.
7. Schmidt’s source here is O’Hare, W. 1992 ‘America’s minorities – The demographics of
diversity’. Population Bulletin 47: 4 (December).
8. Again, this data derives from O’Hare, W. 1992.
9. Crawford (1997: 8) notes that in 1991–92, 55 per cent of LEP children attended schools
with between 90–100 per cent minority enrolments as compared with 5 per cent of native
English speakers. His data is from Bennici and Strang (1995).
10. Waivers to the provisions of Proposition 227 can be granted in some circumstances.
11. However, in view of increased LEP enrolments during the 1990s, Crawford (2002)
estimates that this only amounts to only $149 worth of funding per eligible student.
12. According to Crawford (1997: 11), the shortage of qualified bilingual teachers has forced
many schools into employing uncertified paraprofessionals whose ‘only qualification in many
cases is the ability to speak a language other than English’.
13. Information on the types of educational program provided is drawn from a variety of
sources (e.g. August and Hakuta 1997; Rossell and Baker 1996; Thomas and Collier 1997;
Faltis 1997).
14. The terms ‘subtractive’ and ‘additive’ bilingualism were first used by Lambert (1975). In
subtractive bilingualism, skills in the first language are not consolidated while the second
language is being acquired, with the result that they may eventually be lost through language
shift. In additive bilingualism, by contrast, second language skills are developed, but not at the
expense of the L1. Consequently, fully developed bilingual proficiency emerges. Lambert, and
many other writers, associate additive bilingualism with positive cognitive consequences for
the individual.
15. Willig (1985) excluded five of the 28 studies in the Baker and De Kanter review because
they were carried out outside the United States.
16. Many commentators (e.g. Cummins 1998) regard late exit programs as sounder in theory
than early exit TBE because, unlike the latter – which is monolingual in orientation – the
former seek to develop, to the fullest extent possible, full literacy skills in the L1 and in the L2.
17. To qualify, studies had to: (1) compare students in a bilingual program to a control group
of LEP students of similar ethnicity, (2) randomly assign students to treatment and control
groups, or, where this was not possible, match the groups on factors influencing achievement,
(3) base outcome measures on normal curve equivalents (NCEs), raw scores or percentiles,
and not on grade equivalents, and (4) use appropriate statistical tests to measure differences
between groups.
18. To be fair, Rossell and Baker (1996) acknowledge this problem and call for future research
to take it into account.