“There's a real cost to becoming bilingual.”

Discussing the "English Learner" label with Dr. Ramón Antonio Martínez

Reflecting on the idiosyncratic and troublesome set of language policies that shape U.S. education, Dr. Ramón Antonio Martínez of Stanford University offered a pithy summary of how schools reject the reality of the world around them: “Where I come from, Earth, most people are multilingual ... Monolingualism is not the norm.”

In this second part of our conversation with Dr. Martinez, we explore how student language practices are constrained in schooling contexts, despite a supposed “bilingual advantage.”

Antero Garcia: Can you talk a little but about how students get classified by school systems?

Ramón Antonio Martínez: If you want to enroll kids in any school district in the country, as part of the paperwork, one of the things you have to do is called a home language survey. They have it in multiple languages. You have to answer questions like, what language did your child speak first? What language do adults in the home speak with the child? What language does the child speak to other people in the home? There's some variation, but all school districts are required by federal law to give some sort of a language survey. It's like the first touchpoint or point of contact.

Unfortunately, we need better home language surveys that are more reflective of today's multilingual reality. But the way it works now is, if an answer to any one of those questions isn’t English, that's a red flag. It flags a kid as a potential English learner. What they do then is assess the child.

Alix Dick: And this is a kind of test kids takes in school?

RAM: Each state local education agency has their own language assessment that they administer. Kids are tested to see if they speak English sufficiently, and there are certain indicators of whether or not they're proficient English speakers. Oftentimes, the kids who are tested are in kindergarten or TK or Pre-K. The tests are imperfect, and kids who are little don't like to take tests and aren't especially good test takers, which they shouldn't be. And so lots of kids get misclassified as English learners. These are actually bilingual kids, or kids who are becoming bilingual, but they take the test. And why did they take the test? Because their parents answered one of those questions. They said, there's a language other than English at home.

So that's unfortunate. It's a strike against you if you have a bilingual or multilingual home, you have to be assessed, like an extra burden. It's seen through a deficit lens as something, “Aha! We caught you being bilingual. Let me test you to make sure you're really good enough.” If you answered English to all those questions, you wouldn't be assessed. Doesn't matter your surname, your last name. If you said, “Oh, my kid speaks English. We speak English to the kid, the kids speak English to other adults,” No assessment.

AG: I'm guessing that if you are labeled as an English learner, it dramatically changes the pathways of what school does for you.

RAM: It can. It doesn't always, but it can. Once you take that assessment, if you're deemed to be an English learner, then that's how easy it is, to become an English learner.

AD: Can you ever lose the “English Learner” label once you have it?

RAM: Getting out of that EL status is really hard, and it gets harder the older you get. The criteria for reclassification increase and get harder the older you get. It's no longer just the language assessment you have to pass again, there are content area, like an English language arts content area standardized test assessment gets added onto that. Then there's teacher judgement, which can be totally subjective.

AG: What do you mean by that?

RAM: Teachers get to weigh in, deciding if a kid is a proficient English speaker, based on their interactions. This could be based on a teacher's subjective perception of accent, for example; whether or not a kid speaks in English fluently. Don't get me started on that. [Editor’s note: we do get him started on that in the final installment of this interview, later this month.] That's a criterion that I feel is very problematic and can vary tremendously from teacher to teacher, school to school, district to district.

AG: Can a parent force a school not to designate their kid as an English learner?

RAM: Parents have some influence. They can request that a student not be assessed, or they can dispute the school's assessment and request that a student be reassessed. Parents have to take a real advocacy role, and be very on top of things in order to do so ... You know how schools are in relation to parents, though. It can take some doing for a parent to try to undo what a school has already done, or to prevent a school from classifying a kid as an English learner.

AD: How are parents involved in this process?

RAM: I think parents are kept out of it. Parents aren't really informed in any kind of systematic way about it. Parents are given official paperwork and they may not necessarily understand how that [EL] label can constrain future pathways for the kids; if you get into high school and you're still classified as an English learner, then that means certain college prerequisite courses are off limits to you.

AG: Can you say why that is?

RAM: With an EL label you're taking all these extra courses: remedial this, remedial that, or English language development courses. And in order to take the college prerequisite math courses, for example, you just need time in your schedule. So a lot of kids are prevented from even enrolling in some of the classes until they've shown more proficiency in English, or finished the courses they have to take in order to learn English.

AD: It’s strange how this country makes students take classes to learn Spanish or French or German but penalizes kids who might already speak another language.

RAM: There are a lot of people who talk about the benefits of bilingualism. It's often framed around professional opportunities and all the economic benefits associated with the “bilingual advantage.” But I think there's a real cost to becoming bilingual. Who gets to decide when you're bilingual? Who gets to decide what counts as proficiency or fluency once you've attained bilingualism? And for a lot of these kids, this is sort of the most tragic part of it for me and the part that's so frustrating.

A lot of the kids that I've worked with have been like this young woman in my research who may go to the East Coast for college. She has been bilingual since I've known her--since kindergarten. She's spoken both languages, from my perspective, pretty proficiently and also Zapoteco and added different varieties of sign language and added Korean. So she's multilingual, right? She was never an English learner, right?

“English learner” is not where the story about who these kids are. It shouldn't be the beginning or end of the story of who these kids are. And yet, it becomes so meaningful on their cumulative files for school, on their records. This label follows them. And it can significantly limit their opportunities moving forward. It's unfortunate that that happens but particularly unfortunate for kids who have always been bilingual. That, to me, is particularly troubling.

AD: Being bilingual is not fancy when you are poor.

RAM: Yeah. It's not fancy when you're poor. Exactly. If you're poor, if you are a person of color, it's not an advantage.

Where I come from, Earth, most people are, bi or multilingual. Most people on Earth grow up speaking two or more languages simultaneously. Monolingualism is not the norm. And yet, we've talked about linguistic development in monolingual, terms this whole time. But actually, multilingualism is the norm. These kids who grow up speaking two or more languages: that's a normal thing. And now, we treat it when we frame it as a resource, as an advantage for some kids, it's like, "Oh, look at this exotic thing called bilingualism. That's not normal. It's different. It's an advantage." We would never say that monolinguals have a disadvantage, right? We probably should say that, right?

AD & AG: Right!

RAM: I think we just should just talk about it as sort of the norm. It just is. Bilingualism just is, right? And yet, for some kids, again, if you're a person of color, if you're poor, it's not necessarily an advantage. It won't necessarily, categorically work in your favor.

Increasingly though, wealthier parents--middle class parents, white parents--see it as a form of enrichment. And during that same 18-year period in California when bilingual education was essentially outlawed for English learners, for poor kids, for children of immigrants: that's when dual language blew up in popularity. White parents, wealthier parents wanted that for their kids, and they secured access increasingly to bilingual education through dual language programs during that same 18-year period of restrictive language policy in California.

AG: Where does that bring us today?

RAM: Nowadays it still growing in popularity, but it's sort of like there's a problem that some of my colleagues call the gentrification of dual language education, where white parents, wealthier parents have a disproportionate amount of influence on those policies.

AD: What does this look like?

RAM: Who has access to dual language programs? Whose version of Spanish gets taught in those programs? How do teachers and schools perceive these Mexican and other Latin American children of immigrants who come to the schools and their ways of speaking Spanish? Whose Spanish dialect is perceived as good enough to be taught in schools? What about language mixing? Spanglish?

What assumptions do schools make if someone's mixing languages? Well, they're going to assume that they're doing it because they don't speak either language well enough, right? Whereas bilingual kids do that all the time. When they're with other bilinguals, they know that they can get down like that. But teachers don't always make those same assumptions. This gentrification of dual language education, I think, is a real issue.

Probably the most important issues in bilingual education today are: Who has access to bilingual education? What gets positioned as an appropriate model of English--the English we want these kids to learn? And why are there no dual language programs or fewer dual language programs in Black and Latinx communities. These are issues about access and who can really benefit from this supposed “bilingual advantage.”

Propina

Dr. Martínez is a prolific writer and researcher. If you are interested in reading more of his work, perhaps check out his article, “Beyond the English Learner Label: Recognizing the Richness of Bi/Multilingual Students’ Linguistic Repertoires” in The Reading Teacher.

We’ll see you next week!