What is Sound Educational Theory?

The Case of Second Language Acquisition

Your interest in legal advocacy on behalf of English Language Learners (ELLs) leads you into a summer intership at Immigrant Education Training and Advocacy (IETA), a non-profit legal group that educates parents and communities about the legal rights of language minorities and brings lawsuits against school districts on their behalf.

One of the first things you learn in this arena are the legal standards set by court decisions, especially Lau v. Nichols (a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision) and Castaneda v. Pickard (a 1981 5th District Court decision). The Lau decision requires affirmative steps be taken in the areas of language acquisition and academic content development by local schools and the state, but leaves the methodology up to local expertise. The Castaneda decision takes this one step further and sets standards for appropriate action: (1) that the approach used be based on sound educational theory; (2) that the approach be implemented with adequate resources; and (3) that after a period of time, the approach be evaluated as to its effectiveness in meeting the needs of the students.

A major problem in litigation in this area is in deciding what is "sound educational theory". For example, in 1998, California voters passed Proposition 227 (also known as the Unz initiative) that eliminated bilingual education and required ELLs to be placed in sheltered English immersion programs for a period normally expected to be up to one year. When the soundness of the theory was challenged in Federal Court, the judge was persuaded by Rosalie Porter, a witness on behalf of Mr. Unz, who said that in her experience, one year is a sufficient period for children to learn English, stating that “-- learning subject matter content in a second language can begin to occur in a matter of weeks, starting with the subjects that can be partially understood through symbols (mathematics), active experiments and demonstrations (science), and progressing to the social science.” She further claimed that young children before puberty are able to rapidly acquire English because of a critical period in second language acquisition. Because this witness earned a doctorate in education and has held a lectureship at Harvard University, she was considered an expert, therefore meeting the criteria for sound theory.

The director of IETA, impressed by your background at Stanford and the high standards for research that it holds, asks if you could help.. She informs you that there will be a national conference for civil rights lawyers who work in the area of immigrants, and that IETA has been asked to put together a poster presentation on possible interpretations of the Castaneda standards, especially the part about sound educational theory. You are asked to take the lead role in preparing this presentation. The request is as follows:

Please prepare a poster (or Powerpoint) that is comprehensible to civil rights lawyers, and that address the following:

• What are the major findings regarding second language acquisition that have a bearing on educational programming for ELLs?
• What do teachers need to know about the second language acquisition process and about second language learners in order to be more effective?
• What is the difference between second language acquisition and the learning of academic content?
• What are the normative expectations for the time course of English language development?
• Is learning English different for younger children than for older children?
• Any other questions or issues that you think would be relevant and engaging to judges.

As additional material, you are encouraged to illustrate your points with video footage from teachers of ELLs. These files (on course CD #2) are supplied as examples of excellent, theory-based teaching that could be used in your presentation.

Remember that your audience will be advocacy lawyers. Their interest in this is twofold. One would be as a useful tool legal action, where strong empirical evidence is needed. The second would be in providing guidance to school systems wishing to avoid legal action by taking proactive steps in the areas of curricular reform and staff hiring and development. In the latter, the requirements for evidence are less stringent. An aspect of your poster should therefore assess the strength of the research evidence for the theories.

General Resources:

Hakuta, K. Testimony to U. S. Commission on Civil Rights, April, 2001.

Center for Applied Linguistics

Center for Equal Opportunity

National Clearinghouse (formerly NCBE)

Evaluation:

Your poster will be graded with the following considerations:

• Clarity and creativity in the illumination of theoretical points.
• Connection to content coverage of this course (i.e., readings, materials from classes).
• Assessment of the strength of the evidence.
• Depth vs. breadth considerations: you may either take on a smaller number of issues in greater detail, or attempt broader theoretical coherence with less detail on the points.

This case was prepared by Kenji Hakuta, last modified 4/29/02.