Bilingual Education 35-1 Bilingual Education: Broadening Research Perspectives

was founded as a multilingual society. Bilingual education has existed in various forms for a variety of linguistic groups since that time (Fishman & Hofman, 1966; Kloss, 1977). While early efforts in bilingual education and present day bilingual programs in Canada promote the development of bilingualism as its goal, the majority of bilingual programs in the U.S. today promote bilingual education as a means to achieving the goal of literacy in English only. The focus of this chapter is on research in bilingual education in the US, its history, practices and potential. The introductory section of this chapter will describe a variety of models of bilingual education (BE) and lay a foundation of terminology for those new to the field. The second section looks historically at research in the field of BE both in the development of evaluation research agendas and basic research on bilingualism to examine some of the force