Abstract
The purpose of this review is to provide a balanced description of important aspects of language policy in the United States as they relate, either directly or indirectly, to educational practices. In the first part of the chapter, we briefly describe policy and approaches from the early days of nationhood through the middle of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1960s, the federal government took a more active role in accommodating and, in some cases, promoting non-English languages in education. The first major federal involvement was the Bilingual Education Act (BEA) of 1968 (Title VII of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act), a competitive grant program for schools to develop and support bilingual programs for students not yet proficient in English (Lyons 1992). Other federally supported programs that have dealt with language and education include the Native American Languages Act of 1990 and the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of 2006, which endorse the preservation of Indigenous languages; the National Literacy Act of 1991 authorized literacy programs and established the National Institute for Literacy. The National Security Education Act of 1991 established a program designed to build a broader and more qualified pool of US citizens with foreign language skills in identified “critical needs” languages. In addition, the US Department of Education supports 16 Language Resource Centers at selected universities around the country designed to address the national need for expertise and competencies in foreign languages. The lack of a coherent (explicit) national language policy reflects, in part, broader social divisions about the role of education and, especially, language(s), in society (Tollefson and Tsui 2014).
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Wright, W.E., Ricento, T. (2017). Language Policy and Education in the USA. In: McCarty, T., May, S. (eds) Language Policy and Political Issues in Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02344-1_29
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