ABSTRACT
Two-way dual language (TWDL) is an enrichment-oriented model of bilingual education that is growing in popularity in the United States (Center for Applied Linguistics, 2009; Wilson, 2011). With the goals of bilingualism, biliteracy, and cross cultural competence for all participants, TWDL teaches language through content and content through language, requiring at least 50% of academic instruction to be in the “target” or non-English language. Programs are intentionally structured to admit a balance of “Spanish-speaking” and “English-speaking” students, and expect all students to participate together in integrated classroom spaces, essentially learning language and content from and with one another. In ensuring “balanced language groups,” TWDL programs necessarily have a tendency to place children into distinct categories—either “Spanish-speaking” or “English-speaking,” failing to account for children who enter school along a continuum of bilingualism. Furthermore, while integrating children in the classroom, most TWDL programs mandate explicit separation of program languages for academic instruction, a practice that, although justified in the interests of protecting spaces for the development of a minoritized language (Fishman, 2001), has met with recent criticism as it seems to promote a form of dual or parallel monolingualism as opposed to supporting the development of bilingualism (Fitts, 2006; García & Wei, 2014; Lee, Hill-Bonnet & Raley, 2011; Palmer, Martínez, Mateus & Henderson, 2014).
