Language assessments are often framed as benign mechanisms needed to objectively classify people's linguistic proficiencies. In this article, I argue for the need to critically re-examine how purportedly objective institutional language assessments and our participation in them deceptively reify historical and contemporary inequities. I offer the…

With the 2015 passage of the "Every Student Succeeds Act" (ESSA), the oversight of language policy in U.S. schools shifted from federal to state governance. Although the education of students officially designated as English learners (ELs) has historically been grounded in federal law, we argue that ELs' educational experiences are also…

This paper investigates the factors influencing the likelihood of choice of Gaelic-medium primary education in Scotland by means of the analysis of a national survey of public attitudes conducted in 2012. Binary logistic regression is used to investigate the association of five dimensions found in previous literature to be associated with the…

This study uses 9 years of longitudinal, student-level data from the Los Angeles Unified School District to provide updated, empirically-based estimates of the time necessary for English learners (ELs) to become reclassified as proficient in English, as well as factors associated with variation in time to reclassification. To illustrate how…

Washington state's Transitional Bilingual Instruction Program (TBIP) has existed since the passage of Senate Bill 2149 in 1979, and TBIP is codified in the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) 28A.180. The bill, called "The Transitional Bilingual Instruction Act," recognized that "classes which are taught in English are inadequate to…

In order to be successful in an educational setting, a student must acquire a particular register of language specific to academia, or an academic register. It cannot be acquired through ordinary social intercourse. It is specific to school. Acquiring the academic register is the greatest challenge English Learners (EL) face during their academic…

The passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 established foreign languages as a core curricular area. Nonetheless, educational policymakers at the state and local levels often opt to allocate greater resources and give instructional priority to content areas in which students, and ultimately the school systems themselves, are held…