Promoting School Success for Chicanos: The View from Inside the Bilingual Classroom. Chapter 5

This chapter describes the nature of bilingual education for Hispanics of Mexican origin (Chicanos), outlines successful and unsuccessful classroom approaches to bilingual education, and proposes a research agenda for the future. Four principal approaches have been used in observational studies of language use in bilingual classrooms, including examining the process in which two languages are used with bilingual children; the relationship of process to context, for example, distribution of language use in different program models; the relationship of process to process, for example, how certain teacher behaviors affect the responses of students; and the relationship of process to product, in which effective teaching behaviors are identified in relationship to language use and their effect in promoting student achievement. Research concerning classroom process with respect to bilingual and second language instruction reveals that the selection of a site and community in which research will be conducted is a critical variable; there are many classrooms for Chicanos that use the label bilingual but do not differ significantly from regular classrooms; border communities function differently from other communities in their expectations for language use outside the classroom; and individual schools vary a great deal in the extent to which they create an atmosphere of positive expectations for achievement. It has been found that effective bilingual classrooms promote a high degree of student involvement, contextualize classroom discourse, and integrate students' culture in the curriculum. Future research should focus on applying traditional and ethnographic techniques concurrently to provide a more complete picture of the classroom and to explore individual ability and attitude and their interaction in a variety of classroom processes. Contains 100 references. (LP)