What Does it Mean to be Bilingual? by Vanessa Pinto

Bilingualism...

Before moving to the United States, I had the idea that a second language was essential and that even though it is a privilege to afford to pay to learn one, it is also possible for everyone. All the bilingual schools I have worked at in Brazil, were very expensive private schools, which made becoming bilingual a matter of where you belonged in society. Therefore, being bilingual meant that you would have more opportunities in life. My parents could never have afforded one of the schools that later I have worked at, but they did their best to make sure I learned English at a Language School. After travelling quite a bit, I considered myself bilingual. I could communicate well in English and even teach adults how to speak it. However, my understanding of bilingualism evolved after I moved to the US. After moving, I realized that even with my undeniable high level of English knowledge, I was missing important nuances—both in the language and in the way people communicated. Elaine Ng (Ng, 2015), a researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, defines bilingualism as speaking two languages well, and biliteracy as reading and writing well in two languages. According to her definition, biliteracy is an advanced state of bilingualism, because it is not only about oral communication but also about reading and writing.

What would I consider myself back then? This question is important because I believe that the most important definition of a bilingual person is not being taken into consideration, the understanding of the cultural aspect of the language. This made me reflect even deeper about the cultural dimension of language, and I found guidance in Paulo Freire’s thinking. As stated by Freire “Language is never neutral. It is a means to create or to reproduce reality.”(Freire, 2018) How could we be reproducing reality when teaching children another language without incorporating the cultural aspects of that language? I believe this is a bigger question that we can dive into later, but nonetheless it is a fundamental part of our understanding as teachers of a second language.

I am now divided into two different worlds of language. The language we speak at home and the language I teach at school. My two daughters are bilingual in the sense that they can fluently function socially in two different languages and cultures. However, even though Portuguese is their first language, they have never been introduced to a formal education in Portuguese and are not capable of writing or reading in their first language as they do in their second language, english. In the United States, children that speak a non-English first language at home,  are part of two programs, or DLI (Dual Language Immersion) or ESOL (English as a Second Language). As of 2019, more than 5 million children were formally classified as ELs (English Learners) students (Williams et al., 2023). Unfortunately, in the public system, instead of considering the first language an asset for students, they become a deficit for teachers that are evaluated according to their students’ proficiency in their classrooms. Despite constant efforts from districts to flag and train teachers on strategies and best practices of teaching English as a second language, these children are still being marginalized in the public school system. Therefore, many families end up “hiding” this information when signing up students for the american public school. As of now, I have more than 10 kindergarteners in my class that I know speak another language at home, but only 4 of them were evaluated and have in their register info that they do. This is disadvantageous for these students that are expected to perform as monolingual students that grew up singing all the nursery rhymes and understand all phonological playfulness of the language when they have not been exposed to it. In January I had 90% of my students failing the standard related to identifying rhyming in poems, as the same students could fluently read with automaticity grade-level words. What this data informs me, a global teacher, is that I am not being fair to my students when I am assessing them based on pre-knowledge they should have when they have never been introduced to. As a result, teachers are pressured to pretend these bilingual students are monolinguals, assessing them unfairly against expectations they were never prepared for. Being bilingual, in this scenario, had then become harmful for those students. If we fail to honor their bilingual identities, we risk losing not only their voices but also the rich cultural perspectives they bring to our classrooms.

References

Chinese University of Hong Kong & Ng, E. (2015, January). Bilingualism, biliteracy and cognitive effects: A review paper. Research Gate. Retrieved April 26, 2025, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341149690_Bilingualism_biliteracy_and_cognitive_effects_A_review_paper

Freire, P. (2018). Teachers As Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach With New Commentary by Peter McLaren, Joe L. Kincheloe, and Shirley Steinberg Expanded Edition. Taylor & Francis.

Williams, C. P., Meek, S., Marcus, M., & Zabala, J. (2023, May 15). Ensuring Equitable Access to Dual-Language Immersion Programs: Supporting English Learners' Emerging Bilingualism. The Century Foundation. Retrieved April 27, 2025, from https://tcf.org/content/report/ensuring-equitable-access-to-dual-language-immersion-programs-supporting-english-learners-emerging-bilingualism/?utm_source=chatgpt.com