| One of the vexing questions facing bilingual education supporters in the United States since the 1990s has been how to explain bilingual education's lack of public support in the context of mounting evidence of its educational benefits. In this study, I attempt to shed light on this paradox by examining the role of language ideologies in the public debate surrounding Question 2 in Massachusetts. Question 2 was a 2002 ballot initiative that overturned the state's 30-year-old bilingual education law, replacing it with a requirement that districts provide English language learners (ELLs) with a one-year English-only transition program. An important setting for the debate leading up to the election was the state's most widely read newspaper, the Boston Globe, and this is the source of the bulk of my data, which I analyzed using the tools of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).;My findings illustrate the ways in which actors from the opposing sides asserted their particular definitions of the terms most critical to the debate---"bilingual education" and "immersion," referencing a range of often overlapping narratives about immigration, language acquisition, English, accountability, choice, and fiscal responsibility. I also focus on the Globe's mediating role in the debate, arguing that both in its methods of reporting on the two sides and through its particular uses of language, it played an important role in constructing the discourse. Rather than challenging dominant beliefs either about the role of English in schools or the notion that children acquire second languages quickly, bilingual education supporters went out of their way to affirm these beliefs and to show that bilingual education was in fact successful at transitioning ELLs to mainstream English-only classrooms in a short amount of time. Absent the presence of any serious language ideological challenges in the debate, I argue that the wide margin by which Question 2 passed represents less a rise in what some authors have called English-only ideology, and more a process by which the public, enabled by the ballot initiative process, adopted English immersion as the approach that promised the most efficient way to serve a previously established language ideological consensus. |
