Asian Immigrant Communities' Civic Participation in Cultivating Bilingualism and Biliteracy in the United States

Introduction

The United States has always been a linguistically diverse country as various languages have been spoken by immigrants from different countries and Native Americans. However, the mass immigration has revived and propelled the dramatic increase of linguistic diversity in the last few decades. Specifically, the number of the linguistically diverse population has increased up to 148% in between 1980 and 2009 (Ortman & Shin, 2011). According to 2015 American Community Survey, approximately 21% of the population age 5 and older spoke a language other than English (LOTE) at home, and at least 350 languages are spoken (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015).

Linguistic diversity in the United States, however, has not always been valued and encouraged in various social domains and institutions. Rumbaut and Massey (2013) indicated that sociopolitical reasons had influenced the fluctuation of linguistic diversity and the social attitudes toward linguistic diversity in the United States. During the first half of the 20^th century, the monolingual, assimilationist ideology urged the implementation of English-only policy in public schools and the language requirement for immigrants’ naturalization, systematically imposing assimilation on Native Americans and immigrants, creating negative views of multilingualism (Ovando, 2003). Linguistically diverse students were pressured to make linguistic and cultural adjustments without receiving much institutional and societal support while being blamed for their academic failure.

After World War II, however, linguistically diverse students seemed to be supported as foreign language education came to be promoted and as bilingual education was reintroduced in the schools that served immigrant students. In particular, the Bilingual Education Act enacted in 1968 embarked on the systematic and institutionalized educational support for disadvantaged linguistically diverse students who were mostly Hispanics. Ovando (2003) indicated that the Bilingual Education Act provided an opportunity to recognize “language-minority students’ ancestral languages and cultures … in some form in the contents and processes of school life” (p. 8). However, even with bilingual education programs, the focus of educational support was heavily centered on linguistically diverse students’ acquisition of English, not on promoting linguistic diversity. Thus, instructions in students’ first language or heritage language were considered as a complement to support their learning of English and to help students make a better transition to an English-only learning environment.

Language shifts can quickly take place as linguistically diverse immigrants try to be acculturated to the main society. American-born immigrant children or children who came to the United States as toddlers quickly move to the socially dominant language as early as when they are at pre-school, and the language shift continues through the grade schools as they learn to read and write in English through schooling (Hakuta & D’Andrea, 1992; Pease-Alvarez & Winsler, 1994; Wong Fillmore, 1991). Therefore, immigrant students acquire English eventually not only because there are strong social and institutional expectations for immigrant students’ English acquisition, but also because immigrant students may have an internal desire to belong to the dominant society (Kouritzin, 1999). However, their use of heritage languages may decline dramatically over time as the social expectations and the opportunities to improve their heritage language proficiency are limited (Fishman, 1991; Hornberger, 1998; Rumbaut & Massey, 2013).