Transcript UCLA June 18, 2012

The Utility of Estimating
Bilingualism and Native Language Literacy
in the U.S. Immigrant
Heritage Language Population
UCLA
June 18, 2012
Terrence G. Wiley
Center for Applied Linguistics &
Arizona State University
Overview
• This presentation elaborates on the utility of the American
Community Survey (ACS) for studying the language and
literacy characteristics of immigrant groups in the United
States of America, and also compares the ACS to the U.S.
Census.
• Neither the Census nor ACS questionnaire are structured to
capture the language and literacy skills of immigrant
communities in as far as these surveys only collect information
about respondents’ English oral language abilities and
household data on languages other than English.
Overview Continued
• Direct, self-reported, and surrogate measures of literacy are
discussed, with a proposal to use education level as surrogate
for literacy.
• Select HL subpopulations from the ACS raw microdata, to
measure respondents’ bilingualism, native language literacy,
and biliteracy.
• When such new variables are used in analysis of HL
immigrant communities, a more complex multilingual picture
emerges than is presented normally in Census and ACS data
products available to the public.
• But first, a few background considerations about popular myths
and assumptions that affect popular attitudes, scholarly
assumptions, and the national instruments that are available.
Examples of Concerns about Literacy in the United
States
• Literacy skills are declining
• College students can’t write
• A blue-ribbon report by finds numerous problems in adult
learning, particularly among speakers of languages other than
English
• An adult literacy survey finds 90 million are deficient in literacy
skills
Feel free to add to the deficiency list…
Why is there a perpetual literacy gap?
Expectations for Literacy
Perceived Literacy Gap
Actual Levels of Literacy over Time
Popular Myths about Language and Literacy in the
United States
• The U.S. is an Anglophone Country
• Illiteracy in the U.S. is high because many do not speak English
• Illiteracy in the U.S. is high because immigrants don’t want to
study English
• English is threatened by the sheer number of immigrant
languages
• English literacy is the only literacy worth noting in the U.S.
• English is a global language, therefore “Americans” don’t need
to learn other languages
• The best way to promote literacy is through English immersion
(Wiley, 2005)
Historically, for some groups there has been a decline based on
the prescription and imposition of English Only Policies:
Consider the case of Cherokee:
• 1822 Sequoyah develops a writing system for Cherokee (Lepore,
2002)
• 1833 Three-in-five Cherokee were literate in their native
language and one-in-five in English
• By 1852 Cherokee had better schools than most neighboring
states
• The overall Cherokee literacy rate reaches 90% during the 1850s
• By 1906 the imposition of English-only policies carried out by the
U.S. government had devastating consequences on Cherokee
literacy and biliteracy. “The loss of schools spelled the end of the
widespread bilingual literacy that has distinguished Cherokees in
the nineteenth century (Weinberg, 1995, p. 222).
• Hawaii educational polices yielded a similar fate (Wiley, 1998,
2005)
The Hegemony of Monolingualist Perspectives
When politicians, policy makers, teachers, and even scholars, and
census designers, assume that nation-states and societies are
normally or optimally monolingual, bilingualism/biliteracy and
multilingualism/multiliteracies are seen as aberrant, with negative
consequences, or just rendered as invisible.
Many years ago, Bhatia (1983) noted four dominant assumptions
about so-called monolingual societies:
1. Monolingualism is assumed to have a feeding affect with
literacy
2. Multilingualism is assumed to have a bleeding affect
3. Multilingual societies are assumed to have greater
communication problems
4. The linguistic situation in so-called monolingual societies is
assumed to be too obvious to warrant further serious
consideration
Monolingualists’ Strategic Confusion /Obfuscation
Question: To encourage democratic participation, given a large
Spanish-speaking population, shouldn’t we have bilingual ballots?
Answer: There are numerous languages spoken in the U.S..
Therefore, we need a common language.
Statements of partial fact:
E.g., 65% of those who speak other languages in the U.S. don’t
speak English very well.
Scholarly Reductionism on Language Shift
Only shift counts—not acquisition
There is almost no in-migration into language groups from the
English language group. We are not here referring to the number
of people from English language backgrounds who learn a
minority language. Rather, when we speak of linguistic migration
into a language groups, we require that a person of English
language origin adopt the minority language as his principle
language of use. This is a rather stringent test…. What is important
to understand, however, is that in terms of this definition, there is
virtually no linguistic in-migration into minority language groups.
A high degree of bilingualism in a minority language does not
constitute linguistic in-migration [italics added].
(Veltman, Language Shift, 1983, p. 12-13. (See Wiley, 2005 for
discussion).
What are the implications of the
ideological primacy placed on
English for the retention of
heritage and community languages
in the United States, even for
major languages such as Spanish?
To what extent are schools keeping up?
To better inform policy and practice ACTFL notes
that we need to know:
• How many K-12 students in the nation are studying
foreign [and heritage languages].
• We need to have such data at the state, county, and
district and school levels.
• We need to know how many students are studying
each language.
• We need such data for each grade level at the school
level.
• We need to know how long students have been
studying each language.
(ACTFL, Are Students Prepared for a Global Society, 2010)
What we do know from the U.S. Census:
Back to the data problem:
How do we assess literacy and biliteracy in the national
population?
Historically, there are three major approaches to measuring
literacy:
1. Self-reported measures
2. Surrogate measures
3. Direct measures
Self-Reported Measures
• In 1850 the U.S. Census, and subsequent
censuses merely asked a simple yes/no
question
• Gradually the emphasis shifted to a focus on
how well one could read and write
• By the 1930s
– the rate for whites was 97%
– for immigrants, it was 90%
(Wiley, 2005)
Self-Reported Measures, Continued
• Concerns about inflating abilities:
– A tendency for some to inflate
– Skills achieved may not be retained (Wiley, 2005)
• Concerns about under-valuating one’s abilities
– Those with lesser education may confuse
education with general knowledge/ability (Wiley,
1988, 2005)
There has been some data that suggests selfassessments can be useful (McAuthur, 1993.
Self-Reported Literacy in the Census
• In 1850 the U.S. Census, and subsequent
censuses merely asked a simple yes/no
question
• Gradually the emphasis shifted to a focus on
how well one could read and write
• By the 1930s
– the rate for whites was 97%
– for immigrants, it was 90%
(see Wiley, 2005)
Again, why is there a perpetual literacy gap?
Expectations for Literacy
Perceived Literacy Gap
Actual Levels of Literacy over Time
Surrogate Measures
• Surrogate measures substitute years-of-schooling
for evidence of literacy
–
–
–
–
4 years was accepted by the U.S. army in 1940
5 years in 1947
6 years in 1952
Some now argue for 12 years
• Surrogate measure don’t offer clear evidence of
mastery, but can be useful in the analysis of large
data sets, such as the U.S. Census
(Wiley, 2005)
Direct Measures
Involve tests of simulated functional literacy.
Examples include:
• Adult Proficiency Level (APL 1971), which was
competency-based
• The National Adult Literacy Survey (1992), which
focused on prose, document, and quantitative
literacy
Draw Backs of Direct Measures
Tests of simulated functional literacy may lack ecological
validity.
Who but the person or group involved can really describe
what “effective functioning in one’s own cultural group”
[an APL definition] rally means? Whose needs are served
by the generalized statistics about the population?
(Hunter & Harman, 1979).
Using the U.S. Census and ACS for Language and Literacy Data
• As noted, there is a tendency to equate literacy with
English literacy and, thereby, a failure to acknowledge
literacy in languages other than English.
• This omission tends to inflate perceptions of a literacy
“crisis.” Millions of people in the United States are literate
in languages other than English; they use other languages
as resources, but their abilities are often ignored.
• Thus, analyses of U.S. Census data (Macías, 1988, 1993,
1994, 2000; Macías & Spencer, 1984) and other nationwide
surveys such as the ACS can provide valuable information
that can help correct common misperceptions about
literacy and language diversity.
• As Macías (1990) has noted, however, there are three
patterns of literacy among U.S. language minority groups:
(de Klerk & Wiley, 2008)
One more problem: What do we mean by “literacy”?
(1) Native language literacy, which is literacy in one’s
mother tongue;
(2) Second language literacy (e.g. English), which
implies no literacy in one’s native language;
(3) Biliteracy, or literacy in two languages (e.g., in
one’s native language and in English).
(4) Nonliteracy (i.e., no literacy in any language) is also
a possibility for those who speak a language that
has no written form.
The term illiteracy carries the negative connotation
that one is not educated.
(Wiley, 2005; Venezky, Wagner, & Ciliberti, 1990, see also de Klerk & Wiley, 2008).
Utilizing What We’ve Got to Inform Us about Literacy
and Language Diversity in the Multilingual U.S.
• The U.S. Census v. The American Community Survey
(see de Klerk & Wiley, 2008, Table 1)
• What we’ve got versus what we need.
• Being more creative with what we’ve got.
• Some examples
Total Hispanic-origin (Age 5+) by Schooling
Total Hispanic-origin (Age 5+) by English Proficiency
Total Hispanic-origin (Age 5+) by Education Levels
Selected Hispanic Foreign-born Hispanic Groups
by Literacy
Selected Hispanic Foreign-born Hispanic Groups
by Numbers Literate
6000000
5000000
4000000
Non-Lit
3000000
Literate
2000000
1000000
0
Mexican
Puerto Rican
Cuban
Dominican
Central Am
South Am
Selected Hispanic Foreign-born by Percent Literate
100
90
80
70
60
Non-Lit
50
Literate
40
30
20
10
0
Mexican
Puerto Rican
Cuban
Dominican
Central Am
South Am
Next Steps
• Subgroup Analysis of the Hispanic Population
focusing on the relationship between English
proficiency, English literacy, Spanish literacy,
and employment.
• Results to be presented at UCLA in September
for the UCLA Civil Rights Project.
In closing, it is useful to consider that:
“The development of a schooled literacy that grew up
around the development of Western patterns of
schooling gradually privileged one kind of literacy.
Literacy was not exclusively tied to just one sense of
grammatical correctness, as the term grammar school
suggests to us.
Rather the original sense of a common literate discourse
was based on a notional of social democracy in the
making—a community discourse available to all…
We need to continually remind ourselves that other
voices need to be heard and not disenfranchised by a
single view of a correct language of literacy.”
(Cook-Gumperz & Keller, 1993)