Vietnamese Dual Language Immersion

This case traces one district’s efforts to propose, plan and implement a Vietnamese dual language immersion (DLI) program. Bilingual education began in this major urban school district in the Pacific Northwest over 35 years ago as immersion “magnet” programs to attract and retain students in public schools and save specific neighborhood schools with dwindling enrollment. As innovative educational programs, these initial one-way foreign language immersion programs ¹ focused on languages and cultures (i.e., Spanish, Japanese, and Mandarin) coveted and commodified by English-speaking, mostly white, mainstream families of privilege, completely ignoring and neglecting the second largest emergent bilingual population in the district: Vietnamese. Leveraging the district’s new equity policy and using an equity lens tool, district DLI leaders collaborated with community partners and key district leaders to shift mindsets that fundamentally changed the purpose of Dual Language education in the district and subsequently paved the pathway for proposing and initiating one of the first Vietnamese DLI programs in the United States. Our discussion focuses on how district leaders endeavored to transform DLI from being a “nice to have” enrichment program primarily serving students of privilege and catering to their interests to an academic necessity prioritizing the academic, linguistic, and cultural needs of historically underserved emergent bilingual students.