When Allen Jay Elementary School began its dual-language immersion program in English and Urdu, school officials initially considered translating the curriculum used for the school’s similar program in English and Spanish.
But they quickly realized that Urdu was far too distinct a language for the plan to work, said Hina Ashraf, an associate research professor in the Department of Linguistics, Initiative for Multilingual Studies, at Georgetown University. For instance, Urdu writing goes from right to left.
Leaders in the High Point, N.C., school reached out to Ashraf to help the Urdu-language teachers develop curriculum with learning objectives that best fit the academic, linguistic, and cultural needs of their students. The program that began with just kindergarten now covers all the elementary grades, with the first cohort of graduating students currently in 6th grade. The school started the program to cater to the growing Pakistani community in the area.
The curriculum conundrum that teachers at Allen Jay faced is not unique to their Urdu program. It’s one of the multiple challenges schools face when building out dual-language immersion programs in general, but especially when programs feature less commonly taught languages such as Urdu, Hmong, and Vietnamese.
Researchers working with teachers and schools across the country spoke with Education Week about some of the unique challenges that arise in developing these programs.
Unique languages create unique challenges
Dual-language immersion programs offer instruction of core academic subjects in English and a partner world language. Some programs teach half of the school day in one language, then switch to the other. Some dedicate specific days to each language. In the Allen Jay Urdu program, teachers rely on translanguaging, allowing students to discuss academic content in English, Urdu, and at times other languages spoken in Pakistan.
These programs, including those in more commonly taught languages such as Spanish and French, face similar challenges such as difficulty hiring and training bilingual staff; challenges finding high-quality, culturally relevant curriculum, and community preferences for some partner languages over others, said Conor Williams, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has researched dual-language immersion programs.
But sometimes these challenges can take on unique twists when dealing with partner languages that are less often taught in K-12 schools.
Hmong is a stateless language whose speakers are indigenous people from across southern China and Southeast Asia, who were forcefully displaced as refugees, said Jenna Cushing-Leubner, an associate professor in world languages education at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She works with a coalition of Hmong-language teachers in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California.
U.S. schools cannot order Hmong textbooks from a specific country, nor are there Hmong-language teachers in other countries who might come to work on a teaching visa, Cushing-Leubner said. Instead, teachers in the handful of Hmong dual-language immersion programs across the United States are often members of local communities, and they create their own materials.
Even when teaching materials and related curricula are available abroad, they are not always the best resources for students in the United States.
Alisha Nguyen, an assistant professor of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, bilingual education, and special education at Lesley University, worked with the Boston public schools in developing their Vietnamese dual-language curriculum at the preschool and elementary levels.
While there are textbooks available in Vietnam, Nguyen and Boston educators quickly realized that they didn’t reflect the specific history of the Vietnamese American community in Boston. Most families there are refugees from the Vietnam War and have had a hard time thinking about the war in their own terms. Nguyen has worked with the district to create materials that better capture the community’s experiences.
“We want students to have a holistic understanding of the history of the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese immigration story in relation to Asian American history as well, which you know most of the time is not included in the mainstream curriculum at all,” Nguyen said.
Community advocacy is needed to support dual-language programs
Dual-language programs are sometimes thought of as learning models that can help English learners learn English faster while also developing their home language.
That benefit can sometimes vary depending on the partner language, Williams said. For instance, students in English and Spanish programs might see more of this benefit than those in English and Japanese programs because English and Spanish have more in common.
However, Williams and other researchers said studies have found that these programs overall have benefits for students’ sense of belonging in school, which has translated to academic and linguistic success.
In 2017, Massachusetts overturned a law that eliminated bilingual education in the state for 15 years. Nguyen said that while students learned English in that time, they didn’t reach their maximum potential in language development and lost cultural connections to their own communities, leading to students reporting an overall lack of sense of belonging at school.
To get off the ground, dual-language programs in less commonly taught languages require advocacy from local communities and school leaders, Cushing-Leubner said. These languages are often undervalued because they are not viewed as connected to a major economy or can even be labeled by state or federal officials as dangerous to promote.
Creative thinking is key in building up and sustaining these programs, researchers said, including having K-12 schools partner with universities for curriculum development support and professional development; creating national coalitions through which teachers share materials; and building hiring pipelines within local immigrant communities.
