Educating New York's bilingual children: constructing a future from the past
2011; Routledge; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13670050.2010.539670
ISSN1747-7522
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistic Variation and Morphology
ResumoAbstract This paper describes the ways in which New York City schools have responded to the multilingualism of its children in the last 40 years, and suggests changes needed in order to accommodate the greater linguistic heterogeneity of the city. In the predominantly Puerto Rican community of the 1960s and 1970s, traditional bilingual education programs were the best way to educate language minority children. But in the twenty-first century, with the demographic shifts and the technological advances of a globalized world, other understandings of bilingualism in education are needed. The paper ends by suggesting ways in which traditional bilingual education may exist alongside other more dynamic approaches of bilingualism in education that consider the city's growing linguistic heterogeneity, thus constructing a future from the past. Keywords: bilingual educationNew York CityPuerto Ricansemergent bilingualsdynamic bilingualismrecursive dynamic bilingualismplurilingualismtranslanguaging Acknowledgements A version of this article appeared in the first issue of the journal of the New York State Association of Bilingual Education (NYSABE), Journal of Multilingual Education Research. We thank the editor, Aida Nevarez-La Torre, as well as the President of NYSABE, Nancy Villarreal de Adler, for permission to use this article in this publication. I also want to thank my doctoral students Kathryn Fangsrud, Nelson Flores, Laura Kaplan, and Heather Woodley for their careful reading of the manuscript, and Pedro Ruiz of the Office of Bilingual Education and Foreign Languages in the New York State Department of Education for the information he provided. Finally, I am grateful to Kate Menken, editor of this issue, and to two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and suggestions. Notes 1. The National Origins Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to two percent of the number of people from that country who were already living in the USA in 1890, thus significantly restricting immigration of Latin Americans, Africans, Asians, and Southern and Eastern Europeans. 2. The Board of Regents is responsible for supervision of all educational activities within the State of New York. It consists of 17 members. 3. In Lau v. Nichols (1974), the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Chinese plaintiffs in San Francisco and ordered that something additional be done for language minority students to address their language learning needs in school. 4. The Chinese usage would be 'dialects', emphasizing that these languages are written in the same way. I call them 'languages' to signal their differences. Mandarin, official in both Taiwan and Mainland China, predominates today in New York City. 5. This reflects the title of Stephen Krashen's book: Under Attack: The Case Against Bilingual Education (1996). 6. The LAT-NYHS research project is a longitudinal study of 10 high schools in New York City with large Latino populations. The team is composed of Ofelia García (research director), Haiwen Chu, Nelson Flores, Heather Woodley, Laura Kaplan and Suzanne Dikker (research assistants).
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