Editor's Introduction

The National Association for Bilingual Education has encouraged research and development in the education of language minority learners for over two decades. Part of the association’s work has been to encourage scholarship through doctoral programs and the hiring of minority scholars in higher education and research agencies. This long tradition of supporting the development of expertise in language minority education has increased the amount of research and writing on critical issues that should influence policy and practice. In higher education the expectation is that faculty should generate and disseminate knowledge. This volume of the Bilingual Research Journal presents the work of six recent doctoral graduates engaged in answering nagging questions on how to serve language minority learners from the crib to the classroom. These scholars have focused their attention on critical gaps in the research literature, not only to meet the requirements of the degree, but more importantly to enlighten research and practice.

In “Mexican American Mothers’ Perceptions and Beliefs About Language Acquisition in Infants and Toddlers with Disabilities,” the researcher uses her expertise as a bilingual speech pathologist to investigate mother/child interactions. This study expounds on practices in parent involvement initiatives and points to further investigations in how parental interactions affect the development of children with disabilities. Méndez Pérez also affirms the need to respect the native language when designing strategies for parents to use in supporting language development.

“Involvement of Portugese-Speaking Parents in the Education of Their Special-Needs Children” is another significant contribution to our understanding language minority children who also have special needs. Using qualitative methods, Tellier-Robinson studied how Portuguese parents managed to understand their own role in the education of a child enrolled in a special education program. Here, again, language differences between home and school played a role in how parents managed the interactions with school practices. Clearly, schools need parents as partners to ensure that, once enrolled in school, children will have every opportunity to succeed. And yet, parents continue to report that schools do not listen. Thus, this investigation, while limited to one language group, confirms the conclusion of other such investigations that school success is a shared responsibility. The question remains: How can we forge more positive bonds between home and school where the goal is something more than quick cultural and linguistic assimilation?

Language use is the focus of yet another dissertation, “Mexican American Preschoolers Create Stories.” In this study we learn that children use many language functions to construct elaborate interactions during imaginative “play.” It is interesting that these children were even allowed to replay, given the strong push to restrict school time to direct instruction. This push is the result of high-stakes accountability policies, such as requiring third-grade children to read at grade-level or risk retention. Riojas-Cortéz videotaped children at play in different contexts and, by triangulating her data, found that such activities led to very rich language use, which is the foundation for developing literacy.

In yet another study of language, Arce, in her work, “Developing Voices: Transformative Education in a First-Grade Two-way Spanish Immersion Classroom,” learned how a teacher and her students engaged each other as members of a learning community to meet instructional goals. Using critical pedagogy as the underlying theoretical framework, the researcher investigated how a teacher came to understand how her own critical philosophy became actualized in her teaching so that her students could find their “own voices” in the teaching-learning context. The teacher’s own transformation as she reflects on her teaching led to an understanding of how those reflections were translated into action. In this way, the researcher was also able to determine how the children responded to a process that allowed them to shape their learning. In short, she was able to confirm how critical pedagogy led to critical consciousness in this classroom.

Alanís took a different approach in investigating a two-way bilingual program. Her study, “A Texas Two-way Bilingual Program: Its Effects on Linguistic and Academic Achievement,” sought to determine how well students in a two-way program perform against state-mandated standards. Her findings suggest that while Spanish-speaking students held their own in both languages in the lower grades, once Spanish as a medium of instruction is reduced or eliminated, students lose proficiency in that language. In addition, speakers of Spanish as a second language did not gain much proficiency in the language indicative of a policy that stresses proficiency in English, even in a two-way bilingual program. Alanís discusses the complex sociocultural, political, and philosophical factors affecting program design and implementation, and how such factors ultimately affect student achievement.

“Case Studies of Expectation Climate at Two Bilingual Education Schools” provides still another perspective of how students fare in bilingual education programs. In this study, however, Johnson conducted case studies of two schools to determine how expectations affected program design and implementation. For example, by investigating the program at the school level, the researcher was able to analyze the dynamics of student expectations of both bilingual and mainstream teachers. By comparing and contrasting data, Johnson filtered out teacher beliefs and expectations relative to the influence of the school’s philosophy, curriculum, and orientation toward Spanish as a medium of instruction, and to student achievement. He alerts the reader to the importance of accounting for school climate while trying to affect classroom climate and student achievement.

These six papers are a sample of ongoing dissertation research on the three prongs of research in this journal: bilingual education, biligualism, and language policy in schools. These researchers have chosen very specific areas of inquiry leading to significant information and findings, and there is much that needs further investigation. Their institutions and places of employment should support this continuing work, for we need to learn how to close the gap in the achievement levels of language minority populations. The work with very young children at the language learning stage is critical to our understanding of how to prepare them for school and for the task of becoming proficient readers in two languages. And the work with learners at all grade levels is also critical if we are to mitigate the low levels of achievement and educational attainment of these populations. Thus, recent doctoral graduates must continue to inquire and to disseminate their work as widely as possible. They are among the new generation of leaders who will take NABE into the next two decades.

We are very encouraged by this research and are very proud to have served as guest editors for this volume of the Bilingual Research Journal. This work, however, could not have been completed without the support of the general editors, Josué M. González and Alfredo H. Benavides, and colleagues who helped review the articles: Hermán García, Antonio González, Irma Guadarrama, Millicent I. Kushner, Juan Lira, Judith Márquez, and Patricia Prado-Olmos. We acknowledge your support and leadership.

Sylvia Cavazos Peña
The University of Texas at Brownsville

and

Jaime H. García
Texas Southmost College

May 2001

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