Beyond English Development: Bilingual Approaches to Teaching Immigrant Students and English Language Learners

Abstract

Educational policies for English language learners (ELLs) tend to focus on English language acquisition. In this chapter, we argue that educators need to give more attention to the development of bilingualism and biliteracy to draw upon the tremendous intellectual, linguistic, and cultural resources that bilingual children bring to our schools. Bilingual education programs have the potential to develop language resources of multilingual immigrant students and ELLs that are otherwise neglected in monolingual English programs. In their call for a new educational policy agenda to meet the needs of immigrant students, C. Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (2009) argued that all students of the 21st century should be able to function in multiple languages. They recommended that the new administration "urge more schools to implement dual-language programs that, when well designed and managed, produce excellent results to prepare competent bilingual speakers, immigrant and native alike" (C.