Language and Literacies: ESL and Bilingual Education

Although the fields of ESL and bilingual teacher education have been historically separate, they are now converging. We believe that schools should support students in becoming fully fluent and literate in both their home and additional (English) languages, and that both ESL and bilingual teachers have important roles to play in this process.

Language learning and acquisition theory have moved from structural linguistics underpinnings, to those of “communicative competence,” and toward theory informed by interdisciplinary social/cultural views of language, culture, and learning. The questions of what educators ought to know and what teacher preparation should look like have become even more complicated. Given the diversity of views in the field, we provide a brief rationale for our programs that describes the view of language (and language learning and teaching) upon which they are based.

Language is a complex social phenomenon. There are multiple varieties, forms, and dialects of a language that embed into surface communications other messages about particular social identities (rooted in specific histories, practices, and perspectives), as well as about the status and power of the groups that use the language. We see language as a situated social phenomenon, deeply integrated with (inseparable from) issues of culture, class, ethnicity, and identity. To “learn” a language means not only learning the rules that govern the language, as well as the specific social and cultural practices, beliefs, and worldviews of the multiple groups that use the language, but also how language functions in the world to define individuals and social groups. To “teach” a language, therefore, means to fully understand what’s at stake in situated language usage and to engage students both in using the language and in doing knowledge work about the full meanings and messages that forms of language convey.

In order to enable ESL and bilingual professionals to do just that, our programs include the critical exploration of:

• Pedagogical tools for teaching
• Theories (and the application of such theories) of language choice
• Language usage and second language acquisition
• Ways in which institutions (including and especially schools), communities, and individuals construct specific language and literacy practices and the implications of those practices
• The interplay of discourses in situated social encounters.