| The increasing number of linguistically diverse students in U.S. schools, especially Mexican and Mexican American Spanish-speaking children, continues to challenge the ways public schools are educating this population. After 30 years of controversy over bilingual education, quality education for linguistically diverse students has remained an elusive promise. Two-way bilingual immersion or dual-language education is a program with the potential of fulfilling that promise.
This book is about the education of Mexican American children and their language, literacy, and education rights. It is also about a group of educators committed to fulfilling the promise of bilingual education and providing quality, effective education for these Mexican American children. I chronicle how two-way bilingual immersion education came to be implemented in two schools and what this meant for children’s language and literacy development.
Becoming Biliterate: A Study of Two-Way Bilingual Immersion Education is intended for multiple audiences. Researchers and graduate students will find the policy questions, implementation decisions, and language and literacy accounts informative. Public school administrators and teachers looking for guidance in the education of linguistically diverse students will find the book equally relevant. The focus on the details of the process of developing the two-way program will be of particular interest to those who may be considering developing two-way or dual-language programs in their own settings. Rather than a prescription or a recipe, this book offers readers an analysis of the implementation of two-way bilingual immersion education in two schools and an analytical examination of the classroom instructional practices within these schools.
In the years between 1994 and 2001, I participated with teachers, principals, administrators, parents, and university colleagues in the ongoing task of defining, clarifying, examining, and proposing possible solutions to numerous questions about the language and literacy education of language minority children, in particular, Hispanic or Mexican American students. This book describes a longitudinal, ethnographic, and descriptive study that followed the progress of conceptualization, design, development, implementation, and continuous renewal of two-way bilingual immersion education program in two schools over a 6-year period. The two elementary schools—Bonham and Storm—are in the inner city area of San Antonio, Texas. Both are neighborhood schools that serve a majority, Mexican American school population and are only a few miles apart. Bonham is a small school situated a few blocks from the commercial and tourist center of the city and within the historic King William neighborhood. Storm is a much larger school situated close to an old agri-industrial part of the city and is surrounded by public housing. |