The Seal of Biliteracy is as an initiative to incentivize and credentialize bi‐/multilingualism in K–12 education in the United States. While it has been widely celebrated as a positive development in U.S. educational language policy, it is important to consider to what extent marginalized students benefit from this initiative. This critical policy analysis explores possible inequities in the way that the Seal has been promoted, enacted in policy, and implemented in schools, focused primarily on California. Three findings are reported. First, advocates and policy makers have constructed the purpose of the Seal as primarily aimed at promoting foreign or world language education, raising questions about the degree to which the recognition of language‐minoritized students’ linguistic repertoires is a focus. Second, the policy requirements for demonstrating biliteracy advantage students, especially native English‐speaking students, who are studying a foreign or world language as part of their school's curriculum. Third, schools with high percentages of students of color and students from low‐income families are less likely to participate in the program, suggesting that students privileged along lines of race and class have greater access to the program. This article concludes by suggesting improvements in policy and directions for future research that might contribute to addressing these inequities.
The introduction of the Seal of Biliteracy (SoBL) has presented a potent opportunity for community heritage language schools to credential the heritage language proficiency of their students in a U.S. context. This study explores the involvement of community heritage language schools in the SoBL initiative. It investigates how seven heritage language school administrators view the SoBL, what they see as its potential benefits, and what barriers they see to its full implementation. Results show that despite many potential benefits for community‐based schools, factors such as the status of the language in the wider community, a lack of articulation with local high schools, uneven parental power, and a lack of appropriate assessments, present barriers to full implementation. The paper concludes with suggestions for how to address these barriers and hopes to provide a roadmap for future collaboration between SoBL administrators and heritage language schools.
This issue was designed to include a wide range of research on children's second language learning. Here we provide a short overview of each of the articles contained in this issue, many of which bring up novel ideas and topics, as well as new takes on familiar themes that sometimes challenge prior conceptions and, ideally, inspire new understandings of child language acquisition, and policies, and practices in instructed settings. The 15 articles in this issue are based in instructed and naturalistic settings and include reviews and experimental work, and collectively represent learners between 5 to 18 years old. The language backgrounds include Mandarin (first language [L1]), Arabic (L1), Basque (L1), Cantonese (L1), English (second language [L2]), Hebrew (L1, L2), Spanish (L1, L2), and Thai (L1). Topics include the uniqueness of child second language acquisition (SLA); learning in majority language classrooms; best practices in bilingual schooling, cognition, and SLA in younger learners; testing and assessment relating to age and language choice; and methodological contributions that arise from the particular challenges of researching child second language development in instructed and naturalistic settings. the uniqueness of child slaThe uniqueness of the experiences of younger language learners is obvious, yet is vital to acknowledge its importance with respect to SLA, as Oliver and Azkarai's review article points out (see also Paradis, 2007). When children are compared to adults with respect to context, relationships, and development, interesting differences emerge. In the research presented here, the age of participants ranges from 5 to 18 years, roughly approximating the span of developmental changes over the years of compulsory schooling in many countries, from early to middle childhood and early to late adolescence. In contrast to adult learners, adolescents and younger children in particular lack the independence and autonomy of adults, 1 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi
This study explores the ways the value of Polish is framed in a promotional campaign for Polish heritage language education (HLE), and how heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981) functions within campaign interviews to construct alternative visions for the future of Polish HLE. In communities where knowledge of the HL cannot easily be credentialed or monetized, and where increasing demographic diversity demands to be acknowledged, neoliberal and essentialist arguments for learning the HL often seem incomplete and insufficient. Counting Polish among these languages, I explore how advocates of Polish HLE frame the ways in which Polish can serve as a resource for heritage speakers, identify important absences in this discourse, and then discuss how centripetal and centrifugal discourses (Bakhtin, 1981) vie for primacy in their arguments. I conclude by critically examining the ideologies that contribute to this promotional strategy and suggest future avenues for promotion that move beyond pitches about the global economy and essentialist identity, by centering locality and hybridity
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