The Two Pillars of Bilingual Education

There are two ways bilingual education helps English language develop and contributes to academic success, two pillars of bilingual education. The first ("background knowledge") is the fact that when students have a good education in their first language, they get background knowledge, and this knowledge helps make the English they hear and read more comprehensible. The second ("literacy transfers") is that developing literacy in the first language is a short cut to developing literacy in the second language. These two pillars are consistent with a number of psycholinguistic research findings, which I discuss in detail elsewhere (Krashen, 1996).

The Pillars Make Sense

A series of studies by Fay Shin and associates has shown that the two pillars appear to be reasonable to many people (see Shin, 2000; Krashen, 2003a, for reviews). Shin asked various groups if they agreed that having background knowledge makes subject matter in another language more comprehensible and whether they felt that those who were literate in one language had an easier time developing literacy in a second language. There was widespread agreement, with some "don't know" responses and few disagreements. This was true of teachers, administrators, parents, graduate students (Lao, 2003), and student teachers in Spain (Ramos, 2003).

The Public was not Anti-Bilingual Education

Before 1998 and the anti-bilingual education initiatives, the public was not anti-bilingual education (for a review of poll results, see Krashen, 1996, 1999). I will mention only one poll here, because it is of special interest: The Los Angeles Times (April 13,1998) reported that only 1/3 of those polled preferred English-only; 2/3 approved either of use of the first language with no constraints (25%) or approved of short-term use of the first language (39%). The Dallas Morning News did a similar poll with nearly identical results.

Summary

Let us summarize: The research supports bilingual education, the underlying principles are consistent with other research results, many people find the underlying principles reasonable, and public opinion was, at least at one time. mildly favorable to bilingual education. So why did bilingual education lose in three states, with all this going for it?

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