Which Language ‘Superpowers’ Do Bilingual Students Bring to U.S. Schools?

Los datos ya llegaron, y revelan algo interesante sobre los estudiantes bilingües de los Estados Unidos.

No need to hop over to Google Translate. Chances are good that if you were one of the 5.3 million English learners in public schools, you’d know the opening line explains that recent data has something interesting to reveal about the U.S.’s bilingual students.

The Department of Education dubbed speaking a second language a “superpower” when it announced plans last year to support multilingual education with grants. In states like California and New York, students speak as many as 150 languages.

Spanish is by far the most common home language among English learners, accounting for roughly 75 percent of them, according to the National Center for Education Statistics’ most recent numbers from fall 2021. Its hold on the top spot has held steady as long as the data has been tracked, even as the number of English learners has grown in new regions.

Arabic, the second-most common home language, comes in with a mere 2.5 percent share of English learners nationwide. It’s followed — oddly enough — by English at 2.2 percent. That group is made up of students who may live in multilingual households, or who were adopted from countries where they grew up speaking another language but now live in an English-speaking household, according to NCES.

Chinese and Vietnamese round out the top five home languages, each spoken by less than 2 percent of English learners.

But small percentages don’t necessarily mean few students, relatively speaking, and the diversity of languages changes from region to region.

Vietnamese is the second-most spoken language by English learners in both Texas and Kansas. That comes to about 17,300 students who speak Vietnamese at home in Texas, but only about 800 in Kansas.

Mandarin comes in second among English learners in California at around 2 percent of home languages, but that represents more than 22,000 students.

‘Sink or Swim’ for Some

The English language instruction students encounter can run the gamut from submersion — where they “sink or swim” in all-English classes — to programs where literacy and subject matter is taught equally in English and a home language. While not all emergent bilinguals — as they’re also called — are immigrants, some districts may offer programs or schools for students who are new to the country.

It’s not uncommon for newcomer students to find themselves in the “sink or swim” scenario if they’re in a school district where not many of their peers are also learning English, says Erica Saldívar García, program director of TESOL/Bilingual/World Language Education at New York University.

English as a Second Language (ESL) programs aim to help students learn English quickly so they can participate in all-English coursework. They might include ESL teachers pulling students out of subject matter classes for language instruction, or have ESL teachers going into general education classes with their students.

“It works for a lot of schools because, when your resources are limited and you don’t have enough to staff a full department of English teachers who can support multilingual learners,” Saldívar García explains, “then one person sort of gets tasked with a bigger caseload, and they have students across age levels and grades. Ideally they would work in collaboration with the classroom teacher to support them on continent areas like math, science, etc.”

ESL is different from bilingual education, where students are taught subject material in both English and their home language. These programs might have a goal to transition students to schooling fully in English, and others aim to reach 50-50 instruction in both languages.

Bilingual education teachers are expected to teach in the home language, which means that staffing those programs can be challenging.

Some schools have gotten creative to ensure they have enough teachers, says April Salerno, associate professor of education at the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development.

“They will partner teachers together so that one is teaching in English and one is teaching in the other language,” she says. “For instance, students might go with the English-speaking teacher for half the day and the bilingual teacher for the other half, so they have two classes covered that way.”

That’s not the case for ESL instruction, where the teacher speaks only English with students. It’s often impossible for teachers to speak every home language of their students, Salerno adds, particularly in diverse areas.

“I think that’s more and more the case for teachers, that they have classrooms that have the wonderful resource of having many, many languages represented,” Salerno says, “which often, unfortunately, we talk about as a challenge. I think it’s a beautiful opportunity, but it also means that no one teacher is going to speak all of those languages.”

Question of Power

Dual language programs are a two-way exchange, wherein English learners and English-speaking students help each other pick up the new language while receiving instruction in both.

While the model is considered a “gold standard” by some in the bilingual education world, Saldívar García is among those who have a different view. There are inherently power dynamics at play, she says, because families of native English speakers are typically more well-off than those of English learners.

Dual language programs may appease families of English-speaking students who feel their children would be getting less resources if school offered bilingual education only to English learners, she explains, but there’s also the possibility that more affluent parents could use their cachet to influence the program’s direction.

“When bilingual education started, it was very much a political act to serve immigrant students who had a linguistic need,” Saldívar García says. “There’s a lot of research that literally calls this the gentrification of bilingual education, because now bilingual education has become this new, sexy, different program that’s available to kids in schools.”

She adds the caveat that most students, regardless of their language background, will have a good experience in dual language programs.

“They’ll learn from each other, they’ll become friends, and there’s a lot of cultural exchange that is mostly positive,” Saldívar García says, “but the part I struggle with is with the politics of it. If we’re not careful with creating opportunities for — whether it be newcomer families or families that are already in the U.S. — you enter dangerous terrain where we don’t want these programs to be serving only the needs of one half of those students, and not the other half.”

Helping Students Acclimate

Some districts may have programs or schools designed specifically for students who have recently arrived in the U.S., Salerno says.

“Sometimes newcomer programs might be a school within a school, or they might even be just a single class within a school that specifically draws those students who’ve just recently arrived,” she says, with placement depending on a student’s language proficiency in English.

Salerno points out that although she doesn’t necessarily like the word “newcomer” — which can “label [or] position students as not really belonging or not fully being located there in the school setting yet,” she says — it’s the most widely used.

There’s bound to be a lot of variation among states and programs, but Salerno says she would expect to see families of those students getting targeted outreach to help them understand and navigate the school system.

“Parents might come with all kinds of different expectations about schooling, might not know what the grading system is in the U.S.,” she explains. “So all of these things that go along with acclimating to U.S. schools often fall in the responsibility of newcomer programs.”