Bilingual families in a globalized world simplytranslanguage

Adopting a translanguaging lens when dis-cussing language policy in education means threethings: (a) abandoning a definition of languageas simply what speakers of the same cultural ornational affiliation have, and instead seeing lan-guage as a speaker’s ability to freely deploy allhis or her linguistic resources, both lexical andgrammatical, without trying to adhere to sociallyand politically defined language boundaries, (b)giving up on teaching an additional language asa linear process that students eventually acquireand, instead, adopting a position that language isto be ‘done,’ performed in particular situations,and thus, always emerging, and (c) relinquish-ing the idea of only using the target language ininstruction in favor of leveraging the entire stu-dent linguistic repertoire

translanguagingas “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguis-tic repertoire without regard for watchful adher-ence to the socially and politically defined bound-aries of named

notions of‘standard’ language, and stable group identitiesare disrupted by the processes of transformationof late modernity

As No Child Left Behind silenced the term‘bilingualism’ to focus on English language acqui-sition (Wiley & Wright, 2004), bilingual educationprograms in the United States that aimed to pro-mote bilingualism and biliteracy were mostly rela-beled as ‘dual language’

Transitional bilingual education programs(TBE), in which students who are acquiringEnglish are taught some content throughtheir home language and other subjects inEnglish, in addition to Language Arts, butonly temporarily until students are deemedfluent in English.

educational institutions have functionedmainly to promote the development of ‘standard’English among the masses and the acquisition ofEnglish among immigrants.

Lau is sometimes pre-sumed to have sanctioned the use of bilingualeducation, but it merely established the right ofnon-English-speaking children to receive accom-modations in learning English given its role asthe medium of instruction. Lau did not prescribebilingual education or a method of accommo-dation

y 1919, some 34 states had passedrestrictions on the teaching of ‘foreign’ languagessuch as German, despite the widespread presenceof German and other immigrant languages in thegeneral population.

Status planning also has implicationsfor which varieties or registers of a language aretaught. In essence it involves the ‘privileging’ ofa language variety, typically as a written standard.

hey may also be distinguishedin terms of their goals or orientations rang-ing from (a) promotion-oriented policies, (b)expediency-oriented accommodations, (c) tole-rance-oriented policies, (d) restriction-orientedpolicies, (e) repression-oriented policies, (f)polices aimed at erasing the visibility and even his-torical memory of various languages, and (g) nullpolicies, which refer to the significant absencesof policies

Explicitlanguage planning and policy making in the United States−when it does occur−tends to be done at thestate, local, or institutional levels

one striking feature is the absence of a guiding overarching explicit national edu-cational language policy.