Bilingual Education in the US and New Mexico

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, language: English, abstract: The United States is in the midst of a struggle today. It seems that it is only recently that the population has become aware that they are also a multilingual nation. Despite the lack of an official language policy, the country has managed to achieve a very high level of monolingualism. This is part of an assimilationist ideology that decimated the immigrants' languages as well as the many American indigenous languages. The focus in this paper is on bilingual education in the United States of America. First of all, there will be given some definitions on several terms. Following this, the paper will provide an overview of the historical development of bilingual education from the beginning until the present. In the second part, the focus will be on Bilingual Education Programs for Hispanics in New Mexico. The paper will describe the development of several Bilingual Education Programs in the Albuquerque School District. The paper is mainly based on secondary literature in the first part and several Internet resources in the second part.