31.2517, Review: Applied Linguistics: Coady (2019)
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LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2517. Sat Aug 08 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 31.2517, Review: Applied Linguistics: Coady (2019)
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Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2020 20:33:17
From: Marina Cuartero [marinacuartero at outlook.com]
Subject: The Coral Way Bilingual Program
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36608017
Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-4765.html
AUTHOR: Maria R. Coady
TITLE: The Coral Way Bilingual Program
SERIES TITLE: Bilingual Education & Bilingualism
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2019
REVIEWER: Marina Cuartero, University of Florida
SUMMARY
The 1960s marked the beginning of a new era in the United States linguistic
landscape: Fidel Castro’s revolution resulted in the Cuban exodus to the US.
Thousands of families resettled in Miami in a very short time, which implied
in the imperative need to accommodate Spanish-speaking children in US schools.
The Coral Way Bilingual Program (CWBP) was a two-way immersion program that
resulted from this necessity to integrate them into English classrooms.
In this book, the author, Maria Coady, presents the first U.S. publicly funded
bilingual program in the United States, which impacted English as a Second
Language (ESL) materials and teacher training until today. To this end, she
consulted data gathered from Richard Ruiz (2008) prior research; 12 oral
stories from CW teachers, students, and staff that reflected how languages and
ideologies were rooted in the community at the time.
The book itself is divided into six chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue.
In the prologue, Coady lays out the socio-political context of the time and
how it influenced the societal perception (and acceptance) of languages and
bilingualism. The importance of CWBP lies in being the first bilingual program
that included both English and language-minoritized children intending to
develop literacy in the native and second language.
In chapter 1, Coady explains the bases for the social experiment. She begins
with the historical context, the Cuban revolution, and its exodus. Then, she
goes on to describe how Dade County Public Schools (DCPS) were coping with the
arrival of Spanish-speaking children in the classroom. While Cuban aides
(non-certified Spanish speaking teachers) helped teachers to deal with the
newcomers, outside help from the Ford Foundation and Cuban Refugee Program
funded bilingual teacher training and English material for Spanish-speaking
children in schools.
The Ford Foundation donation also covered the expenses for testing a bilingual
program experiment that would provide second language literacy both to Spanish
and English students. Coral Way was selected because of the neighbourhood
demographics: middle-income Cuban families, an already bilingual Jewish
community, and the economic relationship between the new and the existing
communities. In Coady’s words, the research was quasi-experimental because it
was not randomized: they matched socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, and
gender to a baseline school with similar demographics.
The goals for the CWBP were not only educational but also social. They were
identified as (1) achieving as much as students in a monolingual school, (2)
becoming balanced bilinguals, (3) student biculturalism, (4) enhancing
objectivity in thinking, (5) acceptance of others, (6) vocational potential,
(7) cross-cultural understanding. Coady notes that not all goals relied on
student achievement to determine the program’s success.
In Chapter 2, the author explains the CWBP classroom organization. The
original plan did not integrate speakers of each language. Students learned in
the mornings in the first language and afternoons in the second language. A
balanced 50:50 model was not enforced strictly from the beginning, it was
varied depending on the grade every 4 weeks by adding minutes, “until students
were spending about half of their day either in Spanish or English” (Loveland,
1966). Students had a different teacher in each period and concepts were
reinforced in the second part of the day. The teacher planning session before
the second part was essential for content reinforcement in the afternoon.
Regarding language distribution, students were assigned to either Spanish or
English-speaking classes based on the educator’s belief of the primary
language at home. At the beginning of the CWBP, there was the same number of
Spanish and English Students per course. However, the arrival of new
Spanish-speaking students implied another bilingual room in each grade and
flexible sections of ESL/Spanish as a Second Language (SSL) in the second
period.
Because of the need to accommodate new students’ abilities in writing and
reading, bilingual courses were divided into 3 distinct organizational phases.
Phase 1 was the 50:50 staging model. Phase 2 grouped students by the first
language based on their reading ability level, and then regrouped,
irrespective of their grade level, by their oral ability of the second
language. Phase 3 combined phases 1 and 2, in 1967 and after.
Chapter 3 focuses on educators and the important role they played during the
first years of CWBP. Part of the funding was dedicated to the instruction of
teachers of bilingual students. In the social experiment, teachers had to be
native speakers of the languages they taught.
Firstly, Coady explains the Cuban aide’s schedule and the teacher retraining
program. Before the bilingual program began, they had non-instructional tasks
and they assisted teachers, but not in delivering academic content. Once it
started, they kept working closely with teachers in the planning section
before the second language period. With the Ford Foundation funds, Cuban aides
and other Cuban teachers could complete a teacher retraining program for their
Florida license at the University of Miami during 1962.
Later, in summer 1963, with the Cuban Refugee Program funds, CW developed a
mandatory 6-week course to prepare English and Spanish speaking teachers to
teach in their native language as a second language. They analyzed the
existing curriculum, adapted it for the English and Spanish medium, made it
compatible with Florida state law and DCPS board policies. The
English-speaking teachers only had to adapt their materials to Spanish, but
the other teachers needed to develop materials from scratch for Spanish
speaking students. In 1964 there was a second summer course, but it focused on
the development of materials to support the bilingual curriculum.
In Chapter 4, Coady shows the materials used during instruction: the ‘Miami
Linguistic Readers’. The audiolingual method was adapted for the bilingual
program into literacy-building activities, because of the young learner
capability to develop correct language patterns (Lambert, 1963, cited in
Richardson, 1964). Their worksheets featured activities to establish strong
oral/verbal habits (i.e. listening, repetition, drills).
CWBP developed the ‘Miami Linguistic Readers’ specifically for the
Spanish-speaking students. In 7 levels students were taught linguistic
regularity, minimal pairs, followed by more complex linguistic patterns. The
content emphasized learning about non-Cuban cultural groups since they already
had in-class references about Cuban and American culture. After the
experiment, the ‘Miami Linguistic Readers’ was used in a network of bilingual
education programs across the US.
The English-speaking students used matching texts in Spanish about science,
health, and mathematics in order to reinforce content. This curriculum was
created by Cuban aides. Coady notes that there was parental concern about
receiving adequate instruction and not falling behind monolingual schools.
In Chapter 5, Coady reports the findings of the experiment. Educational and
social data demonstrated student achievement. These data come from Ruiz’s
recordings (2008), and Richardson (1968), a teacher at CW before and during
the experiment.
For educational goals (1, 2), DCPS used standardized tests like the Scholastic
Aptitude Test (SAT) and the Cooperative Inter-American Test. The SAT results
indicated that CW students performed like their peers in the baseline
monolingual school. This outcome corroborated that learning through different
languages of instruction did not hinder academic performance. The Cooperative
Inter-American Test measured bilingual outcomes in Spanish and English for CW
students only. This assessment showed that all groups grew in their first and
second language but did not become ‘balanced bilinguals’. Spanish-speaking
students' results were higher in English than that of English-speaking
students in Spanish. Coady provides graphics to illustrate her interpretation.
Social outcomes (goals 3 to 7), although not assessed in tests, were
considered a tremendous success. This achievement was captured in the
newspaper opinions, the growing parental engagement with the school, and fond
memories of CW students in Ruiz’s recordings. The school operated as a family
with caregiver teachers and the neighbourhood was receptive to the school.
Especially for Spanish-speaking students, Coady emphasizes that the CWBP
empowered students to construct their own identity since the Pan Hispanic
curriculum was more than language learning and literacy development.
In Chapter 6 Coady provides interviews from Ruiz’s recordings (2008) to
portray the role of the surrounding community, in them, the idea of a close
family and positive reception are common themes. The use of Spanish in the
school helped to build relationships outside the school between parents and
educators and strengthen parental involvement in student learning.
In the second part of the chapter, Coady recounted the stories of CWBP
graduates who accomplished goals 3-7, in which their supporting bilingual
experience would enrich their following careers. From the stories, these
graduates were the most likely advocates of bilingual education, traveling,
studying and working internationally.
The author concludes in the epilogue by revisiting the socio-political context
from the 1960s and the current situation of bilingual education and
bilingualism in the US. Especially in Miami, the Florida Department of
Education has essentially followed a policy of official English despite the
linguistic diversity. The author identifies the relationship between language,
ideology, and power for this case and the renaming of the Office of Bilingual
Education and Minority Language Affairs to the US Office of English Language
Acquisition.
Then she goes on to explain the challenges CW faces today, which are common
with other bilingual schools. Firstly, since the setting in Miami in a
neighbourhood is not low-income anymore, this may block additional federal
funding. Secondly, it is a struggle to find highly trained teachers who can
teach content through a second language, and teacher planning time is limited
because of continuous testing.
At last, she finishes with lessons from CW that can be applied to current
two-way immersion programs (e.g. teacher planning time, financial support),
and suggestions for scholars and educators to advocate for bilingual education
and act cohesively as a community with the same vision, determination, and
transformation as those pioneers in CW.
EVALUATION
I commend the author on what is an important contribution to the field. The
book itself is well-written and it is easy to read. That said, at times, it
feels as if the author duplicates content (e.g., Cuban aides, socio-historical
context). This results in somewhat unnecessary repetition since there are
sections dedicated to those topics and most chapters begin with a summary of
the main ideas. In this manner, Coady emphasizes the importance of
understanding the 1960s context and how language ideologies are reflected in
language planning.
Because this book retrieves data and experiences from the 1960s, readers do
not get as much information as research that deals with bilingual education
today. For instance, the researchers did not gather more data from the school
that was compared to CW. Coady gathered as much information as she could, from
Ruiz’s and Richardson’s research, reports from the Ford Foundation, and other
sources. She presents information about the curriculum for Spanish-speaking
students in English (e.g. the ‘Miami Linguistic Readers’) and some Spanish
materials for the English-speaking children. The reader could benefit from
additional materials in Spanish to get a full picture of what the
English-speaking children were doing in class to learn their second language.
Regarding the qualitative data, the first impression is that the meticulously
detailed experiences (e.g. The father of a student who worked in a shoe
factory and later emigrated to Spain) seem too elaborate. However, Coady
includes them because she wants to add the background of the students who took
part in CWBP and their personal episodes of education. Through understanding
these personal events, she tells us that student achievement is more than
testing. In fact, as the author points out, the success of CWBP relied not
only on academic success, but on the accomplishment of the goals that went
beyond the classroom.
To conclude this book is a welcome addition to the field. Readers that would
benefit from this book are educators, scholars, and students involved in
language policies, language rights, bilingual education and bilingualism. They
would benefit because it explains the bases for building a bilingual program,
it gives solutions to problems that may arise (e.g. period distribution and
phases), and it shows the intricate relation with the socioeconomic context.
Moreover, it is a reminder that bilingual education brings short and long-term
formative outcomes for students. Coady’s purpose for the reader is to become
advocates of bilingual education for our schools.
REFERENCES
Lambert, W. E. (1963). Psychological approaches to the study of language
learning and bilingualism. Modern Language Journal 47, 114-121.
Loveland, C. L. (1966) Coral Way Elementary: A Bilingual School. University of
Florida Digital Collections. See http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00066052/00001
Richardson, M.W. (1968). An evaluation of certain aspects of the academic
achievement of elementary pupils in a bilingual program. Unpublished doctoral
dissertation. University of Miami. University of Florida Digital Collections.
See https://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00067747/00001
Ruiz, R. (1984). Orientations on language planning. NABE Journal 8 (2), 15-24.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Marina Cuartero is a Ph. D. candidate in Hispanic Linguistics at the
University of Florida. Her primary research interest lie in the field of
languages in contact, heritage language acquisition, endangered languages,
language revitalization and sociolinguistics.
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