Bilingual Education Case Study

Bilingual education has been in the U.S. since the 17th century, the U.S. has always been a multicultural and multilingual country, and with the evolution of federal policies the rights and needs of ELLs have been taken into consideration. For instance, in Lau vs Nichols, the supreme court ruled that sink or swim was unconstitutional and that ELLs were not receiving a meaningful education, because they were all using the same textbooks as their native English peers. This case made a significant difference in bilingual education, soon after this case more important court decisions and legislations took place; the cases addressed the linguistic and educational needs of English Language Learner students.

Bilingual education gave ELLs the opportunity to develop their native language academically, ELLs are now able to succeed by being fluent in English but with their native language as well. Being in a Bilingual educational program does not just mean to be fluent in two languages, but to understand, integrate, and appreciate other cultures and languages with meaningful

This program can be beneficial for Ells with proper instruction using the Sheltered Instruction Observational Protocol (SIOP); which is when teachers are trained to modify instruction to make it comprehensible for Ells. The goal of ESL is to teach English only, a downside to this program is that bilingualism and biculturalism is not a priority, which means that students are subjected to cultural adjustment issues such as assimilation where they replace their native language and culture with a new language and culture, this issue may cause Ells to feel stigmatized and may cause them to develop a higher affective filter resulting in a lower comprehensible input; in the long term it will take them longer to learn the