Bilingual Education and English-Only: A Language-Planning Framework

Abstract

Public debate about English-only invariably includes reference to bilingual education; furthermore, both are recognized to be language-policy issues. Yet there has been no systematic treatment of English-only placing it within a language-planning framework that also includes bilingual education. This article attempts to do so, examining English-only in the context of corpus and status language-planning types; restrictive and expansive goals; aims, implementation, and evaluation processes; and language-as-problem, language-as-right, and language-as-resource orientations. It argues that a complete consideration of this language-policy issue needs to include both bilingual-education legislation and the widespread concern for English usage; that English-only goals need to be contrasted with other language-planning goals; and that both the underlying orientations and the future implementation of English-only policies properly belong in the arena of debate.