Chapter 1: Bilingual Students Within Integrated Comprehensive Services: Collaborative Strategies

Historically, education has been a practice of norming groups of students based on specific disability, language, or student behavior. At the outset, we want to be clear about two premises. Our first premise is that language is an asset. Students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds who develop bilingualism are better served than students who only gain fluency in English. Therefore, simply labeling these students English language learners or students with limited English proficiency is problematic because they define these students solely in terms of acquiring English. Multilingualism is implicitly devalued. This runs counter to the overwhelming evidence across numerous studies that multilingualism promotes cognitive outcomes associated with achievement (Adesope, Lavin, Thompson, & Ungerleider, 2010). In this chapter we employ the label bilingual to reference these students, which implicitly values linguistic diversity, emphasizing the growth in learning two languages. It does not diminish the importance of focusing on developing oral and written fluency as well as literacy in English, but frames mastering registers of academic English as a necessary, but insufficient educational goal.