Chapter 9: Social Contexts of Reading. This chapter focuses on the many social contexts in which reading is carried out and in which reading develops. We learn to read within a family unit, in various school settings (and their associated goals, expectations, and opportunities), in various classrooms, and in interaction with specific teachers and student peers. Students are also influenced by the wider social and cultural expectations of political, religious, ethnic, economic, and social institutions. Social contexts set the stage for successful reading within the first year of life, and language knowledge, as well as beginning reading, is profoundly shaped in the first five years of life. L2 reading, as it often is learned in childhood or adolescence, is also strongly shaped by social contexts in which learning to read is carried out. Four specific issues include the needs for effective teacher training, the status of minority language instruction in K-12 schools, advanced L2 reading instruction, and most importantly, the role of language and reading exposure throughout a learner’s lifetime. The chapter concludes with implications for instruction.

This chapter argues that disciplining of bilingual education as a scholarly field served to divorce discussions of bilingual education from broader political and economic struggles in favor of the seemingly objective pursuit of the benefits of bilingual education. This disciplining of bilingual education was part of a larger discursive shift that reframed discussions of racial inequality from a focus on unequal access and the need for structural change to a focus on the deficiencies of racialized communities and the need for modifying these deficiencies. The chapter ends with a call for bilingual education scholars to situate issues of language inequality within the broader white supremacist and capitalist relations of power. This will offer bilingual education scholars tools for rejecting deficit perspectives of language-minoritized children and pointing to the broader racial stratification that makes these deficit perspectives possible to begin with.

This chapter analyzes major shifts in US educational policies toward bilingual education in California, where voters are often called on to decide policy by voting on propositions. It focuses on: how language policies have functioned as an instrument of social control; the lingering impact of the Americanization century and English-only ideologies on contemporary educational policies; the contemporary English-only movement and its impact on language minority education; and how a series of discriminatory propositions in California set the stage for language restriction in 1998. The chapter next looks at factors affecting the resurgence of bilingual education as “dual-language” education amidst discourses of globalization since 2016. The chapter concludes by noting new threats to immigrants posed by the criminalization of immigrant status and efforts to deny education as a human right. Implicit in this discussion are questions related to the relationship between language policy and racism and the salience of language policies in racial politics.