ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the educational needs of adult US immigrants with emergent literacy in both their home language and English. It examines educational programs and services that provide options for the group of migrants, highlighting the significance of pre-migration educational attainment for program design in adult education. The three types of challenges are fiscal, structural, and pedagogical, emerge when considering the design of effective programs for adult immigrants with limited literacy in either their expert language or in English. In reality, there are few fiscal or policy incentives for programs to serve low-literate immigrant adults and existing accountability structures may create disincentives. Overall, the chapter highlights ways in which a pervasive ideology of monolingualism leads to educational policies that undermine bilingual approaches, creating persistent barriers that impede the design of effective services for a large and growing population of low-skilled adult migrants.
