ABSTRACT
Dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs are unique because they have explicitly stated goals of sociocultural competence for their students. Forty-five articles were reviewed for this chapter that reported student outcomes related to sociocultural competence in DLBE. The majority of studies were conducted in Spanish-English two-way bilingual education programs, revealing a serious gap in the literature in terms of program type and students represented. To date, sociocultural competence has been somewhat narrowly investigated with a focus on student attitudes and cross-group friendship formation. Some work has attended to the acquisition of a culture associated with the partner language. There has been a discernible shift over time among scholars from considering sociocultural competence emerging as an inevitable outcome of attending DLBE programs to an understanding that deliberate interventions are needed to support student development in this area. Some new ways of thinking about sociocultural competence in DLBE are described and a call is made for future research that includes a deeper more comprehensive theorization of social-cultural competence that better attends to minoritized students and addresses issues of power.
