Bilingualism for All?

It is common for scholarly and mainstream discourses on dual language education in the US to frame these programs as inherently socially transformative and to see their proliferation in recent years as a natural means of developing more anti-racist spaces in public schools. In contrast, this book adopts a raciolinguistic perspective that points to the contradictory role that these programs play in both reproducing and challenging racial hierarchies. The book includes 11 chapters that adopt a range of methodological techniques (qualitative, quantitative and textual), disciplinary perspectives (linguistics, sociology and anthropology) and language foci (Spanish, Hebrew and Korean) to examine the ways that dual language education programs in the US often reinforce the racial inequities that they purport to challenge.

Nelson Flores is Associate Professor of Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, USA. His current projects seek to apply a raciolinguistic perspective to bilingual education in the United States.
Amelia Tseng is Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Spanish in World Languages and Cultures at American University, USA and holds a Research Associate appointment at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Her research centers on multilingual repertoires, race and ethnicity, and identity construction in immigrant and diasporic communities.
Nicholas Subtirelu is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at Georgetown University, USA. His recent research looks at how bilingualism is constructed as a commodity and the implications this has for racial economic justice in language education.