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    Note: The following articles are advance online publications. The full issue will be available in print at the end of the academic year. If you would like to be added to or removed from the mailing list, please contact us at wpel@gse.upenn.edu.


    Volume 35

    Editors-in-Chief: Jay J. Lee and Karla M. Venegas

    Heritage Language Loss of Asian American Youth: Racial Ideologies in Language Policy Implementation (PDF), Cheryl Lee

    The Implementational and Ideological Spaces of the Seal of Biliteracy for World Language Education (PDF), Amy Schindelman

    Redefining Who Belongs in Multilingual Classrooms and Communities: The Conscious Construction of the Midwest School District’s Two-Way Immersion Program (PDF), Lauren McAuliffe


     

     

    Heritage Language Loss of Asian American Youth: Racial Ideologies in Language Policy Implementation  (PDF)

    Cheryl Lee

    In 2016, the state of California voted in favor of Proposition 58, reinstating the power of local education agencies to determine the types of language education programs over which they administer and to permit the creation of bilingual and dual immersion programs in California public schools. The legislation seeks to address language diversity and promotes the bilingual acquisition of California students. In repealing English-only instruction policies, the proposition enables alternative language education pathways for the over 2.5 million California students who speak a language other than English at home. An examination of current school district programs and policies, however, reveals that Asian language bilingual programs are often lacking in number, or simply non-existent, even in large school districts that serve significant Asian American student populations, and this presents adverse implications for language maintenance and identity formation. This paper draws on language policy and critical theory frameworks to deconstruct the documented heritage language loss of Asian Americans through the triangulating forces of institutional language policy, language environments at the local school district level, and racialized ideologies about Asian Americans.

    Published online March 23, 2020

     

    The Implementational and Ideological Spaces of the Seal of Biliteracy for World Language Education  (PDF)

    Amy Schindelman

    Since its 2011 legislative enactment in California, the Seal of Biliteracy (SoBl) has emerged as a policy tour de force in language education across 37 states and the District of Columbia. As SoBl policies show large variation from state to state, district to district, and school to school, questions arise as to what the SoBl award means for various stakeholders in a nation where world languages have historically taken a back seat. This paper first takes an ecological approach in identifying, situating, and tracking the trajectories of primary discourses produced through advocacy efforts and adaptations of the SoBl. I, then, consider how these discourses work to develop implementational and ideological spaces—which interact with one another in both collaborative and confrontational ways—in the contexts of world language educational policy, curriculum, and instruction.

    Published online March 23, 2020

     

    Redefining Who Belongs in Multilingual Classrooms and Communities: The Conscious Construction of the Midwest School District’s Two-Way Immersion Program (PDF)

    Lauren McAuliffe

    The growth in the U.S. Latinx population, in conjunction with residential isolation of African Americans, has resulted in hypersegregated schools that disproportionately serve English Learners (ELs) and Black students. A long-standing incompatibility between federal legislative protections has forced these populations to compete for access to educational resources, such as dual language programs. Though bilingualism confers an array of instrumental benefits, it has, heretofore, been offered to ELs at the exclusion of their Black peers. Such language education programs thus reproduce raciolinguistic ideologies of antiblackness (Sung, 2018). I suggest that two-way immersion (TWI) programs have the potential to enlargen the pie (Valdés, 2002) insofar as they integrate and provide bilingualism to Latinx and Black students. I contend, however, that such programs must be locally constructed. This paper will analyze how the Midwest School District (MSD) designed a language planning initiative in response to their communities’ unique context. Leveraging multi-scalar alliances, actors in MSD cultivated implementational spaces in which multilingual classrooms and communities were redefined to include Black students and families.

    Published online March 23, 2020