Moving Beyond English Learners
In 2016 a White House press announcement “Supporting Dual Language Learners in Early Learning Settings”[1] uplifted the spirits of advocates for the rights of students who are acquiring English in school — immigrants, refugees and children from all over the world learning language, content and culture within U.S. schools. Those of us who saw the positive message make its way across varied social media formats, forwarded by numerous respected educators, felt its potential promise. It was another candlelight to keep our activist flames lit.
The hope stemmed from the potential of finally moving beyond the term “English Learners.”
How we label our students reveals much about how we perceive our children and youth. I have had enough decades in my career as an educator to witness firsthand the movement away from “limited English proficient” towards “English Learners,” albeit it’s early Californian versus federal embrace. Since inception we argued about how belittling the original term had been. Would we describe a student as “limited science proficient” or “limited arts proficient” in our schools? Our concern was casting judgment on capacity of leaners by such labeling that should have been immediately recognized as a pejorative, especially when a student were defined as “non-English proficient” even if that child or youth spoke multiple other languages.
Recently educators have expressed wider interest in adopting the term “dual language learner.” Such nuances reveal a progressive stance in education stemming especially from preschool advocates. Their voices, more than most educators, recognize the critical importance of affirming human development. In perceiving students as capable of everything powerful that makes us educational brilliant, they adopted a positive stance that affirms the language(s) inherited at home from families as foundational for the multilingualism all students can achieve. Those of us in K-12 and university instruction have much to learn about adopting words that communicate our beliefs and principles.
Take note, for example, of the P3 (Prenatal through 3rd Grade) Initiative in urban regions across California, now coalescing a number of social agencies, expressing similar attention to bilingualism.[2] Early childhood education advocates well recognize the many strengths parents bestow upon their children, rich capacities families entrust us to grow when they drop their kids off in our schools, such as the languages they bring.
True, language is but one important goal in our schools, but it is a vital one highly influential of academic, social, cultural capital. More importantly, how language learning is supported and native languages are grown become hallmarks to sustaining mental health and the human inheritance which enable children and youth to thrive. For too long we have missed the leverage that learning through multiple languages would bring our language learners. We already know all too well about its merits, from research of the benefits of multilingualism, that to do less would be a disservice to the cognitive abilities we wish every learner to acquire. Our words, referring to our intent, matter.
Reconsideration of the classification label will reflect our ultimate goals that must similarly change in harmony with our values. Indeed, for many years educators of our youngest students have been utilizing the term “Emergent Bilingual.” They too referred to “Dual Language Learners.” Among some of my colleagues in school districts and universities, we have expanded to “Multilingual Learners” because in K-12 education we already have tri-lingual schools in our communities. The time has come to revise our lexicon.
In much the same way as we evolved away from “LEP (Limited English Proficient)” to “ELL (English Language Learner)” to “EL (English Learner)” we must encourage one another to embrace new terms and flip the usual conversation on its head towards multilingualism rather than simply English mastery. Already I have heard many teacher candidates in San Diego State University utilize progressive labels, proving it is doable and already underway. Consequently I am determined to follow the evolution and promote the paradigm shift.
In addition, the entire concept of how students are measured, rated and labeled needs revamping. Last year an epiphany arose when I became as a member of the statewide content review of the new English language proficiency test (the English Language Proficiency Assessment of California, which replaces the “CELDT” — California English Language Development Test). The ELPAC, based on the state ELD standards and other content standards, is designed to rate students along a scale such as “Emergent,” “Expanding,” “Bridging” or “reclassified” (= no longer an “English Learner”). I realized that if ultimately only English counts, then the entire focus of the measurement of ELs be rethought. Although the California Spanish Assessment is coming, when will we have measures for linguistic proficiency and oracy in other native languages considered for school and district accountability?
Imagine then, rather than pursuing a goal to “reclassify” ELs via a monolinguistic focus of the revised state EL test, California instead began to focus on measuring both 1st, 2nd, or even 3rd language proficiency, to evaluate how bilingual a student has become. We would then redefine the accompanying scale as “Emergent Bilingual” “Expanding Bilingual” and finally “Nearly Bilingual” and reclassify as “Fully Bilingual.” We might eventually have tests similar to ELPAC for other California world languages in Spanish, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Tagalog, etc.
Such attention on measurement of bilingualism would transform the assessment system absolutely. Examining multilingualism would highly influence the next iteration of the language arts/ language development standards that would therefore be co-developed for all essential languages, instead of what happened this last time (a translingual adaptation post English production), because the premise should be that each language has its own path and challenges.
Increasingly, we must rethink our premises. We should consider what we measure, what we teach and how it all aligns towards emerging multilingualism. Now is the time to latch on to the terminology and energy of preschool and other educators who have focused on identifying our students as “Emergent Bilinguals” etc., because it reframes the argument by recognizes what students bring and all the paths that can follow. Naming students as “Dual Language Learner” is rational and sound in its assumption that children are fully capable of being who they were raised to be and more as they are exposed to multiple ways of speaking and interacting with the world. We see that already in mixed heritage families that bequeath the multiple ancestries upon their children including language.
Meanwhile in the K-12 world, legislators still promote a premise of converting students new to English into monolinguals, even if sometimes subconsciously, because the entire reclassification question can be summed up as “how quickly can they be taught English” instead of asking how bilingual they have become. Our measures reveal this inequity.
It is high time that our agenda for advocacy for language learning broaden from birth to Doctoral graduate. We end up closer to our goal of promoting multilingualism when we rethink what we teach (standards, foundational human development, etc.), what we measure (language development assessments, academic tests, human development markers) and what we report (“bilinguality” or “multilinguality” rather than “reclassification” progress). Naming the world for progressive goals requires that we attend to the words that intend to describe students by our end goals.[3]
Indeed I want more for our students. I still continue to seed “dual language learner,” “emergent bilingual” and “multilingual learner” into all conversations about what the future could be. Our students are capable of much more and they should be named by our very aspirations for them.
[1] https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/fact-sheet-supporting-dual-language-learners-early-learning-settings
[2] http://sdedsynergy.org/p3sd-2/p3sd-conference/
[3] Darder, A. (2015). Freire and Education. New York: Routeledge.
