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Language Education of Asian Migrant Students in North Americalocked

Language Education of Asian Migrant Students in North Americalocked

  • Guofang Li, Guofang LiUniversity of British Columbia
  • Zhongfeng TianZhongfeng TianRutgers University–Newark
  • , and Huili HongHuili HongDepartment of Teaching and Learning, Vanderbilt University

Summary

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, media and education have devoted increasing attention to Asian students’ intensified experiences of anti-Asian racism. However, less attention has been devoted to their language and literacy development, which is central to their social and academic success in schooling. Situated within an expanded view of linguistic, cultural, racial, and economic diversity among Asian ethnic groups, studies in the past decade mainly address two areas—mainstream language education and heritage language (HL) education of K–12 Asian migrant students in North America. Research on mainstream language education reveals “hidden” achievement gaps among Asian subgroups and Asian learners’ continuous struggles with negotiating multiple intersecting language, culture, gender, and racial identities; racial profiling; and pathologizing actions from mainstream White educators and peers, arguing against the monolithic model minority stereotypes. The mis/missed-representation of Asian languages and cultures in the mainstream curriculum further reinforces the dominant deficit discourses against Asian learners in the classrooms. Studies on HL education mainly concentrate on three areas: parental support and involvement at home, community language schools, and world language and immersion programs in K–12 schools. While they each provide Asian students with great opportunities to maintain their cultural and linguistic heritage and to cultivate positive ethnic identities, challenges remain in finding innovative and effective ways to foster sustainable HL development and to develop critical consciousness among different stakeholders to combat racial injustices. There is an urgent need for both mainstream and HL educators to adopt critical pedagogies and create humanizing spaces to better serve Asian migrant students in North American K–12 classroom settings.

Subjects

  • Curriculum and Pedagogy
  • Education, Cultures, and Ethnicities
  • Languages and Literacies

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed education. One of the unintended consequences is its negative impact on language and communicative skills development for K–12 children due to social distancing, mask mandates, and online instruction during school lockdowns (Charney et al., 2021). Several large-scale studies in Canada, in the United States, and around the world on children’s academic learning during the pandemic have identified significant language and literacy learning loss (“COVID-slide”) during the pandemic, especially among learners from disadvantaged homes and school districts, thus amplifying many preexisting educational inequities confronted by these groups (e.g., Cardoza, 2021; Dominique et al., 2021; Engzell et al., 2021; Vaillancourt et al., 2021). For example, based on assessments conducted in the spring and fall of 2020 among grade 1 to 3 students from over 100 school districts in the United States, Dominique et al. (2021) found that students’ English oral reading fluency in second and third grades is approximately 30% behind expected achievement levels and that preexisting achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged schools have also been widened during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Canada, widespread learning losses in reading among learners in grades 1 to 3 have also been reported in different school districts in Alberta and Ontario (Betkowski, 2020; Vaillancourt et al., 2021). Meanwhile, remote learning during school closure is widely seen as a significant leading factor to the “COVID-slide” (Donnelly & Patrinos, 2022; Storey & Zhang, 2021).

Asians have been reported to be far more likely to choose to learn remotely than members of any other racial or ethnic group during the pandemic in the United States due to fear of racism (Kamenetz, 2021). In fact, according to the Institute of Education Science’s Monthly School Survey in February 2021, almost 7 in 10 Asian American K–12 students chose to learn online exclusively, at a percentage rate 12 points higher than Hispanic students, 15 points higher than Black students, and 45 points higher than White students (Kamenetz, 2021). New reports show that some of them may be “disengaged” and “disconnected” in online learning and concerned about the intensified racial microaggressions against them (Zhang & Halpern, 2021). Furthermore, the learning loss due to remote learning during the pandemic is compounded by the long-existing English proficiency gap between native English-speaking students and Asian nonnative English-speaking students. Asian American students are reported to have the highest proportion of speakers (35%) who are deemed “limited English proficient” (those who speak a language other than English at home and who speak English “less than very well”; Ramakrishnan & Ahmad, 2014). Furthermore, English proficiency among different Asian ethnic groups varies significantly. While large majorities of Japanese (85%), Filipino (84%), and Indian (82%) students aged 5 years and older speak English fluently, Bhutanese (36%) and Burmese (38%) groups—both of which have considerable numbers of recently arrived immigrants—were found to have the lowest English proficiency rate (Budiman & Ruiz, 2021b). Also, 20% of Asian Americans are “linguistically isolated” (meaning no one in the household who is 14 years or older speaks English exclusively or “very well”). This rate is second highest after the Hispanics (21%; Ramakrishnan & Ahmad, 2014).

There is no doubt that Asians’ preferred learning choices and their unique linguistic background characteristics will have important implications for language and literacy development among the younger generations presently and in the years to come. However, little research has been devoted to Asian migrant students’ language and literacy learning, particularly from a multilingual, racial, and equity perspective. In North America, Asian students have been subjected to a single story of the model minority myth that portrays Asian Americans as high academic achievers with no academic or social difficulties (Li, 2019, 2021; Li & Wang, 2008). In educational research, the image of Asian students as model minorities has been weaponized to draw attention away from the stagnating improvement in Black/White and Latino/White achievement gaps and the systemic inequities and racism that members of these ethnic groups face (Shafer, 2017). Consequently, the achievement disparity between White and Asian Americans is either disregarded or misinterpreted.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, media and education have devoted increasing attention to Asian students’ intensified experiences of anti-Asian racism. However, less attention has been devoted to their language and literacy development, which is central to their sociocultural and racial experiences in schooling. Seeing their first languages as important assets for their second-language learning and development, this article reviews the literature on Asian migrant students’ dominant/mainstream and heritage language (HL) education and identifies existing barriers that affect their becoming successful bi- or multilingual learners. The sections that follow first discuss the diversity among Asian migrant groups. It is worth noting that despite an 83% increase of the population since 2000 (Budiman & Ruiz, 2021a), clinical research on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander populations has accounted for only 0.17% of the National Institutes of Health’s budget since 1992 (Doàn et al., 2019). This information indicates the lack of funding support for the study of the Asian population at the government level. What follows is a review of current research concerning K–12 Asian students’ education in English as a second language or other dominant languages (such as French in Canada) and their development in their first or HLs. Finally, suggestions are shared for improving Asian students’ multilingual learning and education.

Diversity Among Asian Migrant Students in North America

The Pew Research Center has reported that Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in North America (Budiman & Ruiz, 2021a). In 2000, the Asian population in the United States was 11.9 million, and by 2019, it had almost doubled to 22.4 million, an 88% increase in only 2 decades (Budiman & Ruiz, 2021a). Based on the 2021 U.S. Department of Education report on the conditions of education, Asian students accounted for 5% of public elementary and secondary enrollment in both autumn 2009 and fall 2018 in the United States. Similarly in Canada, migrants from Asia have become the top immigrant groups, with 63.5% of newcomers to Canada between 2017 and 2019 being born in Asia (Statcan, 2021).

Although often lumped together as Asian Americans/Canadians, Asians are culturally and linguistically diverse with many unique cultures, languages, and ethnicities. In the United States, the recent census recorded 22 million Asian Americans who trace their roots to more than 20 countries in East and Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent (Budiman & Ruiz, 2021b). According to Casino (2019), over 40% of the U.S. population speaks Asian languages, after Spanish and English. The most spoken languages include Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Hmong, Nepali, and Hindi (which also includes many varieties and sublanguages such as Bengali, Telugu, Panjabi, Gujarati, and Urdu; Casino, 2019; Ramakrishnan & Ahmad, 2014). In addition to being linguistically and culturally diverse, Asians are also racially diverse. According to the 2017–2019 American Community Survey, while 83% of Asians identified as single race, non-Hispanic, 14% identified themselves as multiracial and 3% as Hispanic Asians (Budiman & Ruiz, 2021a).

Furthermore, Asians in the United States have been found to be the most economically diverse (So, 2021) and present a wide range of social classes. In fact, Asians have replaced African Americans as “the most economically divided” racial or ethnic group in the United States, with the gap in the standard of living between those near the top and those at the bottom of the income ladder nearly doubling from the 1970s to 2016 (Kochhar & Cilluffo, 2018). In 2019, Asian households in the United States had a median annual income of $85,800, which was greater than the $61,800 average for all American households. However, many Asian subgroups, including the two with the lowest median family earnings—Burmese ($44,400) and Nepalese ($55,000)—were significantly below the national median. Poverty rates among Asians in the United States vary greatly, just as they do with education and wealth. For instance, Mongolian and Burmese people had the greatest poverty rates (25% respectively) of any Asian origin group, more than twice the national average and nearly four times that of Asian Indians (6%). These diversities of the Asian population in North America serve as a counterweight to the stereotypical image of a “model minority.” The ethnic, demographic, educational, economic status, and social class heterogeneities among Asian subgroups are well documented and noted by Budiman and Ruiz’s (2021b) report on the key facts about Asian groups in the United States. By 2060, the Asian population in the United States is expected to reach 46 million. By the middle of the century, Asian Americans are expected to be the nation’s biggest immigrant group. Six ethnic groups make up 85% of all Asian Americans. Chinese Americans are the biggest group of Asian ancestors in the United States, accounting for 24% of the Asian population, or 5.4 million individuals. This subgroup is followed by Indian (21%), Filipino (19%), Vietnamese (10%), Korean (9%), and Japanese (7%). Nearly half of Asians in the United States (45%) reside in the West, with nearly a third (30%) in California alone. As of 2019, 72% of all Asians in the United States were “proficient” in English, which means they spoke entirely English or the language extremely well. Around a quarter (27%) of Asian Americans live in multigenerational families. On average, Asian Americans outperform the general U.S. population in terms of economic well-being, but this varies significantly between Asian origin groups.

The large within-group differences revealed in the above review suggest a fundamental need to address the different social classes rather than seeing Asians as a homogeneous group devoid of social and educational difficulties. Social class matters, particularly for recent waves of Chinese immigration, in terms of educational habits, dispositions, family expectations and excess money, economic status, and ability to pay for tutors, private schools, and university courses. Additionally, this need requires future research studies that clearly address intersectionality and social class, complicating any assertions that a single “ethnicity” (e.g., “Chinese” or “Vietnamese”) is class or culturally homogeneous. That is, no thorough sociocultural/historical research is complete without taking social class into account adequately.

Situating research within an expanded view of diversity among Asian ethnic groups in North America, this entry focuses on issues salient to Asian students’ language development. Second-generation Asians have been reported to experience rapid first-language loss while gaining proficiency in the second language (Kasinitz et al., 2008; Portes & Hao, 1998). Using Google Scholar, ProQuest, Education Resources Information Center, and our institutional library database, extensive reviews have been conducted of Asian immigrants’ heritage and second-language education in the past few decades (e.g., Li, 2013; Li & Sun, 2019; Li & Wen, 2015; Wen & Li, 2016). This entry aims to focus on recent trends and developments in the past decade (2010–2021) since those earlier reviews and address emergent differences in both mainstream and HL education in the North American contexts.

Asian Students’ Mainstream Language Education in North America

Studies that document Asian students’ language educational experiences have focused on mostly three areas: (a) Asian students’ language (i.e., English reading) and academic achievement gaps among different Asian subgroups as well as in comparison with other racial or ethnic groups; (b) Asian students’ intersecting language, culture, gender, and racial identities; and (c) the absence of representation of Asian languages, cultures, and histories in the mainstream schools and their curricula. Together, these studies provide a powerful counternarrative to the model minority discourse that has been circulating in the education of Asian students in North America.

Research Focus 1: Reading and Academic Achievement Gaps Among Asian Subgroups

One group of studies has focused on the differential achievement gaps, including reading and mathematics performances, within the Asian subgroups, arguing against the monolithic model minority construction of Asian students. All these studies demonstrate that the achievement gaps among Asian subgroups have been mostly ignored. Pang et al. (2011) examined 272,000 seventh graders from 13 Asian ethnic groups in California who took the California Achievement Test 6 in reading and math between 2003 and 2008. These 13 groups included Asian Indian, Bangladeshi, Burmese, Chinese, Filipino, Guamanian, Indonesian, Iwo Jiman, Japanese, Korean, Lao, Malaysian, Maldivian, Marshallese, Native Hawaiian, Nepalese, Okinawan, Pakistani, Palauan, Singaporean, Samoan, Tahitian, Taiwanese, Thai, Tibetan, and Vietnamese. Their analyses of disaggregated data revealed that while some groups such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean American students scored significantly higher in reading than White American students, most of the Asian ethnic subgroups “performed at significantly lower levels” and the achievement gaps between White American students and many Asian groups were described as “disturbing in magnitude” (Pang et al., 2011).

Echoing Pang et al. (2011), Carnoy and Garcia (2017) provided further evidence of the hidden achievement gaps among Asian subgroups using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress on the math and reading performance of students in the fourth and eighth grades from 2003 to 2013. In their analysis, they categorized Asians by their English Language Learner (ELL) statuses, as well as by reduced and free lunch provisions (which are indicators of socioeconomic status or SES). Their analysis revealed that the achievement gap in eighth-grade reading (and mathematics) between Asian ELLs and White students, as well as between Asian ELLs and Asian non-ELL students, had greatly widened from 2003 to 2013. Even though by 2013 Asian non-ELL students had scored about half a standard deviation higher than White students in mathematics, Asian ELL students were slipping further behind White students. There was essentially no catchup for Asian ELL students compared to Whites and their Asian non-ELL counterparts. In terms of SES effects, it was found that in eighth-grade reading, the gap for both poor and less-poor students increased for all students, including Asian ELLs and non-ELLs from 2003 to 2013. Carnoy and Garcia’s (2017) concluded that Asian ELLs are “either increasingly less proficient than those not so designated, or that schools are doing a poorer job over time of teaching them math and reading” (n.p.).

A recent study by Kang et al. (2021) analyzed the 12th-grade mathematics scores and college major selections among Asian ethnic subgroups, including Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese and Thai, Indian and Sri Lankan, Korean, and Japanese, using the National Center for Education Statistics’ 2009 High School Longitudinal Study data. They found that Filipino, Vietnamese, and Thai students were “invisible” victims of inequality in STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields and there existed heterogeneity in the achievements within Asian American populations, debunking the widespread perspective that Asian American students have uniformly high academic performance. Furthermore, they noted that many Asian subgroups such as Burmese and Hmong, who were among the most socioeconomically and academically disadvantaged groups, were not included in the original data set, a common issue echoed in other large-scale studies such as Pang et al. (2011).

Some other researchers focused on one of the specific Asian subgroups. Gunderson and D’Silva (2016), in the Canadian context, uncovered the disparities in achievements among a large cohort of about 15,000 Chinese-heritage students in K–12, drawing on data from multiple sources, including interviews and large databases. Specifically, they compared students of Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking backgrounds and found that even though Cantonese speakers scored significantly higher in English reading and word recognition than Mandarin speakers upon entry into Canada, Mandarin speakers outperformed Cantonese speakers in high school achievement scores “in a number of courses at a number of grade levels” (p. 98). For example, Mandarin speakers’ grades were significantly higher in English and social studies achievement in Grades 8 to 12, with many Cantonese-speaking students’ English scores falling below a mean of average (grade of C) in both subjects. Among the two Chinese subgroups, there were significant gender differences, with Cantonese-speaking boys being least likely to be eligible for postsecondary education and Mandarin-speaking girls having the highest achievements in all areas. Their analysis complexifies and challenges the stereotypical view of all Chinese students as model minorities.

In sum, this body of research has made evident that achievement gaps among Asian subgroups have mostly gone unnoticed. Disaggregated analyses from different national data sources all pointed to the underachievement of Asian subgroups, especially students with limited language proficiency. As a whole, these studies provide a heterogeneous picture of Asian students’ language and academic achievement, especially among socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, refuting the prevailing model minority stereotypes. Meanwhile, the research studies unfold the scarcity of research on some subgroups, which indicates the prejudice against certain communities.

Research Focus 2: Intersecting Identities and Struggles of Asian Students in the Mainstream Classroom

Another large body of studies on Asian students’ language and learning experiences in the mainstream classroom has explored their continuous struggles or negotiations of multiple identities, including those of language, race, class, gender, and religion. These studies show that Asian students’ identities are inextricably related to the positioning work that occurs during social interactions in school, and opportunities and restrictions are decided in large part by the power and status relationships among Asian students, their teachers, and peers. These socially constructed identities and positions govern and change Asian learners’ access to and engagement with social, cultural, and academic experiences and activities (Hawkins, 2004).

One example is a case study by Chen (2010), who examined identity construction by one 9-year-old Chinese ELL, Evan, in different school communities such as his mainstream classroom community, advanced math group community, and his ELL community in an American elementary school. While he was a funny, creative, and intelligent member of the mainstream and math communities, he was identified as a student with limited English proficiency and behavior problems in the ELL community. While Evan conformed to the desirable qualities recognized in the mainstream and math communities by enacting such identities, he resisted being positioned as a troublemaker and ELL by using the strategy of outsmarting his knowledgeable peers and challenging his teacher and the teaching agenda, which in turn reinforced the ELL teacher’s view of him as “aggressive.” Evan’s story suggests that Asian ELLs, with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, are likely to experience identity conflicts among various school communities. His story may also indicate his resistance of this socially constructed identity. A similar account was provided by Lan and de Oliveira (2016) of the experience by another 9-year-old Chinese immigrant student, Yuna, in a mainstream fourth-grade science classroom in the United States. Like Evan, Yuna was judged by the teacher as “disorganized and distracted with behavior problems” due to her constant questions and interruptions during instruction. The researchers found that such teacher’s perspective discouraged Yuna’s participation in the classroom discussions and interactions.

Asian students are also found to position themselves differently in relation to their Asian and non-Asian peers centering on language (i.e., ELL) and racial identities. In a study of 10 high school Chinese students who came to Canada after the age of 15, Qian (2016) found that these students considered their Canadian-born Chinese and early arriving Chinese peers, who preferred to use English at school for social purposes, as a non-Chinese group together with students from the dominant language backgrounds. Additionally, these late-arriving students positioned themselves differently in varied classes. For example, they considered themselves outsiders in English and social studies courses that required stronger English proficiency and knowledge of North American sociocultural histories and therefore remained mostly silent in these classes but insiders in more content area classes such as math and science, even though they struggled with report writing in those areas.

Similar to these stories of East Asian students’ linguistic and racial positioning, Samra’s (2020) investigation of seven South Asian students’ schooling experiences in Canada found that they all experienced a sense of inferiority in relation to their White dominant peers and struggled to find a complete sense of belonging in the mainstream school because their self and cultural identities were also suppressed during school. Consequently, the South Asian students internalized their oppressions by aiming “lower” for their goals in school and “compartmentalized parts of [their] being” to be accepted by others (p. 66). As well, the students internalized the idea that “model minority” behavior was “a beneficial form of self-preservation” (p. 70). The findings echoed Sayani’s (2014) study of 45 Indo-Canadian male students in a Canadian high school who were positioned as academically inferior and deficient by their White teachers and non-South Asian students as “[lacking] intellectual ambition and abilities” (p. 189) and were “unfairly profiled and a target of surveillance” (p. 187). In fact, all of them noted that they “were treated by their teachers as though they were dumb, lazy, and uninterested in schoolwork” (p. 281). These negative schooling experiences were “disabling and defeating” to the South Asian boys (Sayani, 2014, p. 189). Similar to Samra (2020), Sayani (2014) also found that the Indo-Canadian boys were “complicit in the pathologizing of their own identities” and intentionally chose to live up to educators’ deficit perceptions of them by resisting learning and achievement (p. 365).

Similar deficit-based theorizing about South and Southeast Asian male students was also reported in the United States. In a study of the narratives of four male Hmong students who were identified as “at risk” educationally by their schools in California, Endo (2017) revealed that the “at-risk” label intersected with a range of other deficit-based expectations and several problematic gendered and racialized assumptions about Asian American masculinities and Hmong American culture. Similar to the Indo-Canadian students documented by Sayani (2014), these students also internalized some of the assumed low expectations that their White school personnel had of them “by referring to their peers of color or themselves as ‘dumb,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘not smart,’ and ‘troublemakers’” (Endo, 2017, p. 612). Huster’s (2013) narrative study of thirteen 1.5-generation Hmong female students’ language and literacy development found that Hmong female students also experienced similar deficit-oriented, gendered, and racialized schooling in their interactions with both educators and classmates and felt “suspended between languages” even when they made it to college. These findings were also validated in several other quantitative studies such as Xiong (2012) on Hmong students using U.S. census data from 1990 to 2010 and Dang (2021) using data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (1991–2006) focusing on Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese American students’ language use and educational attainment.

In addition to these negotiations of linguistic and racial positionings, Qin and Li (2020) revealed how Asian students’ gender identities were also intersectionally shaped by linguicism and the racialized discourses of the Asian model minority. In their study, Tiger, the adolescent ELL from Taiwan, despite being a disciplined shotput athlete, was bullied as gay by his peers because of his clothing style and being Asian. He was treated differently from White students in some classes and ridiculed for his accented English, which led to his resistance to his teachers’ instruction and his disengagement in several of his classes. Consequently, Tiger was getting Cs and Ds in his content and English as a second language classes.

While most studies focused on Asian learners’ English education, a few studies (e.g., Sun, 2013; Yeung, 2011) have focused on Asian children’s French-language education experiences, mostly among Chinese immigrant students. Yeung (2011) documented how five young Chinese children’s engagement in multiple language and literacy practices in Chinese, French, and English shaped their emerging Chinese and Canadian identities. Sun (2013) explored the French learning experiences of high school students of Chinese origin in Quebec, Canada. The study highlighted newly arrived students’ difficulties in learning French and that the schools provided insufficient support to ensure multilingual students’ linguistic and social integration. Another noteworthy research study was done at a French-language secondary school in Quebec by Bakhshaei and Henderson (2016). The researchers discovered that among all pupils of immigrant background, those from South Asia had the greatest dropout rate. Girls from this group, on the other hand, consistently outperformed their male colleagues from comparable ethnic backgrounds. Additionally, their data indicate three main reasons why South Asian female adolescents in Quebec’s French-language secondary schools exceed their male counterparts in terms of educational attainment: family expectations after migration, home socialization, and school relationships. Moreover, an exceptional study was conducted by McAndrew (2010) on the Muslim community and education in Quebec, Canada. The researcher provided an overview of the Muslim community’s sociodemographic characteristics in Quebec, Canada, and its educational experiences in Quebec schools. The researcher then delved deeper into three significant controversies that have targeted the Muslim community over the past two decades: the end of Arabic teaching in the late 1980s, the wearing of the Muslim veil in the mid-1990s, and the broader reasonable accommodation debate in 2007–2008. The researcher argued, based on a large study of Quebec schools, that these disputes have facilitated, to a degree, the adaptation of public schools to the needs of Muslim students.

While school provision may be a factor, studies have found that Asian learners’ attitudes toward the different mainstream languages (i.e., favor toward English over French) may also be a contributing factor (Au, 2004). In comparison, the South Asian community, accounting for 1% of the population in Quebec, Canada, remained “invisible” and their children’s challenges of adapting to French- and English-speaking schools were often neglected (Bakhshaei et al., 2021). In conclusion, this body of research has discovered that Asian students must negotiate multiple identities that intersect with their Asian as well as ELL status in school and often lead to “intersectional harm” on their academic achievement and well-being (Li, 2021; Qin & Li, 2020). Certain Asian subgroups are often positioned as “inferior” or “intellectually weak or deficient” to their dominant White peers by both their mainstream educators and non-Asian peers. They, in turn, tend to internalize these oppressions and consequently set “lower” objectives in school in order to gain acceptance from others. These negative experiences have evoked strong unpleasant emotions such as worry, discouragement, and indignation among Asian students so affected (Rawal & De Costa, 2019). In the meantime, mainstream school personnel lack cultural competence and awareness that their pedagogical behavior and actions (e.g., how they assess, diagnose, and interact with Asian students), shaped by their lack of understanding of racial, cultural, and linguistic differences, have exerted multifaceted negative impacts on their schooling.

Research Focus 3: Mis/Missed-Representation of Asian Languages and Cultures in the Mainstream Curriculum

A third group of studies has focused on the mis- or missed-representation of Asian/Americans in the mainstream curricula. For example, Endo’s (2012) case study of six second-generation Japanese American youths’ experiences in their high school revealed that not only were Asian/Americans largely excluded from definitions of diversity and multiculturalism but also, when White teachers included lessons intended to teach about Asian/Americans, the content generally reinforced Orientalist stereotypes, particularly colonizing images of the cultural exoticism–pathology binary and/or racial sameness. Consequently, the well-intentioned multicultural education that reinforces racial stereotypes “does more harm than good” to the participants (Endo, 2012, p. 14). Focusing on Hmong culture and history representation, Yang (2012) outlined several examples of inaccurate information about the Hmong presented in contemporary materials produced by school district staff and/or published by mainstream publishers in the United States for use with the K–12 market to teach about Hmong culture and history. A recent dissertation study (Yang, 2016) examined how a Hmong-based charter school, the first of its kind in Northern California, operated and executed its curricula, instructional practices, and pedagogies to meet the linguistic, cultural, and academic needs of Hmong students. The study revealed that although a comprehensive character education program was in place to assist young Hmong children in becoming productive and responsible members in society, the language and cultural requirements of Hmong students were not being adequately addressed as Hmong language and cultural practices were considered a subset of the charter school but not included systematically or centrally in the school’s curriculum.

Similarly, in Canada, Asian languages and cultures have been absent from the mainstream curriculum (Li, 2021). In fact, it is due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic and the intensified anti-Asian racism that educators have begun to realize that Asian/Asian Canadian histories and cultures are absent in the Canadian curriculum. Across Canada, school districts have begun to acknowledge the need to collectively unlearn racism “beyond the history lessons [about Asians in Canada]” (British Columbia Teachers’ Federation or BCTF, 2020). However, Ontario is the only province that is taking some action to compile some resources for teachers to address anti-Asian racism in the classroom. Similarly in the United States, efforts to address anti-Asian racism have just begun in the educational systems, with Illinois in July 2021 becoming the first state to require that public schools teach their students the history of Asian Americans to help dispel the stereotype of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners or a model minority (Associated Press, 2021).

These mis/missed-representations of Asian/Asian American histories and cultures were related to White mainstream teachers’ lack of cultural competence. In a study on 85 South Asian American students’ perceptions of their K–12 schooling experiences, Rice (2017) found that the participants’ perceptions of low teacher cultural competence were closely correlated with their overall negative experiences in school, and many of their language and academic needs were not met in school due to their teachers’ lack of cultural knowledge about Asian/Asian American histories and cultures and their subscription to the model minority myth discourses. These students’ perceptions were corroborated by Lee and Oxelson’s (2006) study of K–12 public school teachers in California, which found that many teachers expressed negative or indifferent attitudes toward HL maintenance and did not see it as their job or the role of their schools in HL maintenance efforts. In a survey study of multilingual learners’ (including those of Arabic, Chinese, English, Filipino, Hindi, Urdu, and Vietnamese backgrounds) perceptions of how schools responded to cultural diversity in four of Alberta’s school boards, Ngo (2012) found that the diverse learners assessed schools “least favorably with respect to encouragement of heritage languages in schools, availability of culturally focused services in schools to support ethnocultural families, and involvement of ethnocultural families in promoting their cultures” (p. 219).

Asian Students’ HL Education in North America

Historically, Asian migrant families in North America have struggled to find ways to maintain their HL due to an interplay of different factors. National language policies in the U.S. and Canadian mainstream education tend to focus on promoting English and societal-dominant language learning (i.e., French) at the expense of HLs. These movements (such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001) have led to resources being increasingly drawn away from language programs and bilingual programs being reserved for only a limited elite population (García, 2005; Wiley, 2014; Wu et al., 2014). Meanwhile, race-based legislation and discriminatory immigration laws targeting Asian minorities (such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Immigration Act of 1952, and the Order in Council of 1962) induced many Asian families to attempt to protect themselves from racist attacks by abandoning their HL culture that may appear foreign (Tuan, 1998). Asian HL loss is thus a longstanding problem, which is associated with a series of negative consequences, such as the alienation of children from their family members, communication rifts between generations, and a sense of identity crisis for individuals (Li & Wen, 2015).

To combat HL loss among Asian migrant children, a number of different efforts have been made for decades. Generally speaking, much of HL education is grounded in grassroots initiatives at home (i.e., parental support and involvement) and in community language schools that offer language/culture instruction for a few hours per week on weekends. In recent years, there has also been an increase in Asian language programs and courses in K–12 schools (i.e., world language and immersion programs), although East Asian languages (such as Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Japanese) are reported as the dominant languages being offered. The following review describes HL education in these three areas.

Research Focus 1: Parental Support and Involvement at Home

Asian migrant parents in North America are reported to employ a variety of approaches on their own to support their children’s HL maintenance, such as using more HL than English at home, organizing family gatherings, providing daily TV and other multimedia exposure in HL, and actively connecting with their distant-homeland people via modern communication technologies (Li & Wen, 2015). Similar ways of engaging children in HL use were also found in Hong’s (2016) study of three ethnic groups’ efforts to retain HL: Korean, Chinese, and Japanese migrant families in Canada. Hong found that while all of them shared similarities in approaches to maintaining HL—such as adopting an HL-centered (or even HL-only) policy at home on a daily basis to foster children’s oral proficiency and providing children with storybooks, magazines, and other printed materials in HL—these three Asian families also exhibited differences in their focal points for HL oral language development and degree of involvement in literacy activities. They also displayed different expectations toward children’s HL literacy development: Chinese parents did not particularly expect their children to be literate as long as they could speak HL (possibly because of the complex orthographic systems of the Chinese language) while Japanese migrant families appeared to be the most supportive of their children’s HL education by locating multimodal literacy materials, monitoring children’s reading activities, and encouraging writing practices.

While current research demonstrates that Asian migrant families actively participate in children’s HL maintenance via varied strategies, some studies also revealed that certain Asian parents hold negative attitudes toward HL and play a minimal role in maintaining it. In Xia’s (2016) study of a group of middle-class Chinese migrant families in a metropolitan area in the Southwest United States, findings demonstrated that parents’ desires to prioritize English learning, which were hugely influenced by the societal English-only ideology, resulted in an English-dominant home environment (e.g., parents invested more in English literacy activities and materials for children) with little room for Chinese practice (e.g., very few enforced a Chinese-only policy at home). This study echoed the results from Tuan (1998) and many previous scholars (e.g., Kasinitz et al., 2008), which also reported a general disinterest in HL maintenance and assimilation ideologies among middle-class Chinese Americans’ families.

In short, research has shown paradoxical patterns among Asian migrant families in maintaining HL at home. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, home learning has become an essential part of students’ life, which also provides parents with an opportunity to reimagine ways to support children’s HL development. Future research must continue to unpack different factors affecting parents’ beliefs and ideologies toward HL, especially parents from other Asian subgroups, to explore effective practices and strategies (such as family language policies) to support children’s HL and positive identity development and to examine ways (such as parent education programs) to help parents—especially higher SES ones value the importance of HL and understand the hegemonic role of English from a critical perspective.

Research Focus 2: Community HL Schools

In addition to parental support and involvement at home to maintain HL, Asian migrant parents also send their children to attend HL schools as part of their formal HL education (Kawaguchi, 2014; Park, 2011). These schools, normally called weekend or Saturday HL schools, are often organized and established by ethnic communities to provide migrant children with venues to learn about their HL and culture and to maintain connections with families and communities. They have been historically recognized as “the strongest efforts for the teaching of heritage languages” that occur outside of mainstream schooling (Kelleher, 2010, p. 1). Community HL schools are usually concentrated in areas with large ethnic communities, for instance, in California and New York in the United States and Ontario and Alberta in Canada. Given the diversity among Asian migrant groups, there also exists great diversity in HL schools (see more in Li & Wen, 2015); however, current literature has focused mainly on schools for three languages: Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

In Hong’s (2016) study, parents with Chinese, Korean, and Japanese backgrounds believed that HL schools promoted “language learning, culture maintenance, and the establishment of co-ethnic friendship networks” (p. 14). For instance, Korean students not only practiced their oral and literacy skills but also participated in cultural activities (e.g., learning traditional musical instruments and performing Korean fan dance). Students in Japanese schools got the opportunity to increase both their linguistic competence and cultural awareness about traditional holidays and Japanese manners and behavior. Interestingly, Chinese parents “are found to be more prone to establishing co-ethnic networks through HL schools compared to their Korean and Japanese counterparts” (p. 14). They saw HL schools as a major platform for their children to have coethnic peer interaction. These advantages were further corroborated by Triest’s (2018) and Chow’s (2018) studies, both of which offer students’ perspectives. Triest (2018) explored the experience of HL learners in Japanese schools in Southern California, United States, while Chow (2018) looked at Chinese adolescents’ HL learning in Chinese schools in a western Canadian city. Most students in both studies shared that learning at HL schools contributed to their ethnic identity development and helped maintain connections with their family, community, and cultural heritage, although the impacts of these benefits were not the same for Japanese HL students of different generations.

Despite these positive aspects, current research also identified certain challenges regarding learning at HL schools. Li and Wen (2015) discussed a number of pedagogical factors affecting students’ learning ability, motivation, and emotion, such as a limited number of instructional hours and rather formulaic teaching approaches (e.g., repetitive drills and rote memorization exercise), materials that have little relevance to students’ lives, and lack of qualified teachers. To provide HL learners with more meaningful, engaging, and equitable learning environments, some recent studies have encouraged HL instructors to adopt translanguaging and multimodal approaches strategically and purposefully in classrooms. For example, Lee (2021) examined first-grade and third-grade Korean emergent bilingual students’ oral and written language use over 14 weeks at a Korean HL school in the United States. She found that students naturally drew upon their full linguistic resources (both English and Korean) in their speech and writing to achieve different learning purposes (e.g., to mediate their understanding of complex concepts, to express their ideas at the draft writing stage, and to present their bilingual identity). Therefore, she called upon HL educators to create translanguaging spaces where “the students and teachers can display dynamic bilingualism that allows the students to use their entire language repertoires flexibly” (p. 185) instead of strict insistence on one language only in instruction to facilitate students’ language and literacy learning. Du’s (2017) investigation of first-grade Chinese students’ learning experiences at a Chinese HL school in Canada further confirmed that teachers’ use of both English and Chinese (i.e., translanguaging) could effectively support children’s biliteracy development. In addition, she also found that the multiliteracies approach—engaging learners in multimodal ways (e.g., drawing, music, gestures, craft making, and nursery rhymes) to learn Mandarin—contributed to students’ motivation and positive attitudes toward HL learning.

In summary, community HL schools provide Asian students with great opportunities to maintain their HL and cultural heritage and to promote a deeper understanding of their ethnic identity, yet challenges remain in finding innovative and effective ways to foster learners’ sustainable HL development. Future research must continue to explore HL schools that offer other diverse Asian languages (in addition to Chinese, Korean, and Japanese) and to study how HL teachers can use translanguaging and multiliteracies as pedagogical strategies judiciously and systematically to improve their instruction and assessment for bilingual students’ language and literacy learning. Some other teaching approaches that can be further explored in Asian HL classrooms are culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2021; Paris, 2021) and Sun and Li’s (in press) transcultural approach.

Research Focus 3: World Language and Immersion Programs in K–12 Schools

While parental support at home and community HL schools plays a major role in Asian students’ HL maintenance, in recent years, there has also been a rise in Asian language programs and courses in K–12 schools, which serve as additional pathways for developing HL language and literacy skills. There are two types of programs offered in North America: world language programs, where students receive instruction in the target language to develop language and literacy proficiency, and immersion programs, where students receive content area instruction in two languages (English and another partner language) with a minimum of 50% of instruction in the language other than English (Howard et al., 2018). Mandarin Chinese has become one of the popular languages offered in the K–12 systems in the United States and Canada due to China’s growing influence on the world economy in the 21st century (Lü, 2019). For example, the United States had 317 Mandarin immersion programs in 2019, a dramatic increase from 61 programs in 2011 (Lee & Wang, 2021). Other Asian languages gaining traction include Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese.

To date, very few studies specifically focus on Asian students’ experiences in these programs. One reason is that world language and immersion programs in Asian languages are being gentrified toward White, native English-speaking students with a relatively small enrollment of Asian heritage students (Li & Wen, 2015; Valdez et al., 2016). While world language and immersion models have been hailed as effective ways to promote language and literacy development and cultural competence (Fortune & Song, 2016; Xu et al., 2015), some recent studies (among the very few) pointed out some issues that need to be addressed in order to better serve Asian students.

Wu et al. (2014) investigated Mandarin learning experiences of seventh and eighth graders who are Chinese American students from working-class families attending Chinese HL classes at a charter school in an urban northeastern U.S. city. They revealed a mismatch between students’ true HL and the institutionalized surrogate HL (Mandarin). Many of the students on the Mandarin track were actually speakers of oral language varieties of Chinese, such as Cantonese, Fujianese, and Hakka (although these varieties share a similar Chinese writing system), and they had very limited access to Mandarin at home. Compared to their Mandarin-speaking peers, these students experienced the most frustration and alienation in the classroom and gradually lost interest in learning Mandarin because of the hegemony of Mandarin over their HL varieties and irrelevance to their own imagined identities and desires. Wu et al. (2014) thus proposed raising critical language awareness for Mandarin educators (Pennycook, 2001) to understand the heterogeneity within Chinese diasporic communities in the United States (instead of assuming ethnic Chinese students are all from Mandarin-speaking households), to learn about the rich linguistic repertoire of Chinese American students and create spaces for them to utilize their HL as resources, and, more important, to have critical conversations with students around issues like valuing linguistic plurality (i.e., multiple “Chineses”) and contesting dominant language ideologies (e.g., the unequal power relations between Mandarin and other Chinese varieties).

In addition to recognizing Asian students’ multilingual backgrounds and developing critical language awareness in world language instruction, Cha (2016) identified some challenges from the programmatic level based on his in-depth mixed-methods analysis of Hmong world language programs at the secondary level in four California districts in the United States. While overall these programs promoted Hmong HL students’ literacy development, they lacked a comprehensive curriculum (such as a textbook that could be used as a pacing guide, a teacher’s manual, and supplementary materials and novels) and common resources that all similar courses within the district could utilize to align instruction, to address the World Language State Standards, and to build a coherent program. The scarcity of resources and related issues are not unique to Hmong world language programs. As other Asian world language programs (such as Hindi and Tagalog) continue to emerge in K–12 schools in North America, it is important that different educational stakeholders work together to include these components for maximizing student learning outcomes and for sustainable world language program development.

Furthermore, there is a recent call for reexamining the strict language separation policy model in immersion programs, which reflects a monolingual view of bilingualism as “two solitudes” (Cummins, 2008). A group of researchers (e.g., de Jong, 2016; García & Lin, 2017; Hamman, 2018; Sánchez et al., 2018; Somerville & Faltis, 2019) thus argues for developing flexible, multilingual spaces where the dynamic nature of bilingualism can be recognized and bilingual learners’ full linguistic repertoires or translanguaging practices (García, 2009) can be leveraged as a resource in meaning-making tasks. Tian’s (2020, 2022a, 2022b) study, which was conducted in a third-grade Chinese immersion class in a U.S. public school, provides immersion educators with concrete examples of designing and implementing translanguaging pedagogies strategically and purposefully across different content areas (Chinese language arts, social studies, and science) to facilitate bilingual students’ content understanding, build their metalinguistic awareness, and foster their positive bi/multilingual identities.

To summarize, world language and immersion programs in K–12 schools are promising models for maintaining Asian students’ HL. However, future research must continue to examine and unpack the complexities of Asian students’ low enrollment in relation to hegemonic discourses, gentrification issues, and racial ideologies (Lee, 2019). Meanwhile, more studies are needed to focus on diversity, equity, and justice issues in these programs in order to provide Asian students with more heterogeneous and inclusive learning environments. World language and immersion educators can start with designing and implementing translanguaging and critically conscious pedagogies in their classrooms to challenge oppressive power structures and promote social justice.

Conclusion

This review of research on Asian students in the past decade makes clear that Asian students in North America are culturally, linguistically, and racially diverse, with a plethora of distinct cultures, languages, and ethnic backgrounds, although this diversity has yet to be appreciated or capitalized on by mainstream schools. The findings further confirm that the stereotypical notion of Asian students as model minorities is not accurate as Asian students’ language and achievement discrepancies between various Asian subgroups have been consistently documented in research. Asian students’ language education demonstrates complex social, cultural, racial, and relational action and reactions in their exploration and negotiation of multiple identities in various school, home, and community contexts. What is troubling is the consistent reporting from a diverse body of research that Asian students’ language and schooling experiences are subjected to racial profiling and pathologizing actions and behaviors from mainstream White educators and peers (Sayani, 2014). It is not surprising that Asian American/Canadian cultures and histories are persistently omitted from diversity classifications and discussions and mainstream curriculum, and there is a profound lack of cultural competence related to Asian American/Canadian cultures and histories among mainstream educators.

These collective findings on Asian students’ English education have important implications for reforming mainstream education for Asian students. Educators must be mindful of the achievement gaps among the Asian subgroups. Without such awareness, teachers may be misled by the “model minority myth” into believing that none of the Asian children are facing academic or social difficulties. It is crucial for teachers not to draw broad judgments about Asian students’ achievements but, instead, recognize each student as a unique learner with distinct strengths and shortcomings. Additionally, the long-existing racism, linguicism, and other forms of discrimination confronted by Asian students but overlooked and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic must be addressed (Guo & Guo, 2021; Hsieh, 2022; Li, 2021; Shafer, 2017). There is an urgent need for systemwide efforts to expand current antiracism work to include anti-Asian racism. Given the profound lack of cultural competence among educators, there is a need to provide educators with specific professional development that highlights Asian American/Canadian cultures and histories and strategies to integrate them in language and content instruction in K–12 education.

Asian students’ HL education is grounded in three aspects: the home, community HL schools, and K–12 schools. While each of these efforts offers great promises for HL maintenance (and meanwhile faces their own challenges), they have been an isolated endeavor without any cross-context collaboration so far. It is, therefore, critical that all three entities “must build on their own strengths and work as partners to ensure the success of reversing language loss among Asian immigrant children” (Li & Wen, 2015, p. 285).

Furthermore, Asian students’ mainstream language and HL education have tended to operate as “two solitudes” (Cummins, 2008) in distinct educational spaces of school, home, and communities. This separation has generated multiple identity conflicts and struggles for Asian students. Moving forward, there is a need to promote hybridity of language education in mainstream schools, community HL schools, and Asian language programs in K–12 contexts. According to Meighan (2021), promoting HL pedagogy that connects learners’ knowledge and ways of knowing and being in the mainstream English classroom can not only help address the cognitive and linguistic imperialism of the colonial monolingual English classroom and validate HLs and knowledge systems but also provide opportunities to engage in critical discussions to foster cultural sustainability and promote positive identity formation for all multilingual learners. Similarly, Sun and Li (in press) advocate a transcultural pedagogy in the HL classrooms to bridge learners’ local mainstream cultural learning and their transnational experiences in their home country. Such a transcultural approach in the HL classroom promotes cultural hybridity that sustains multilingual students’ multiple belongings and enables them to negotiate new and different contexts and communities (Sun & Li, in press).

Last but not least, given the anti-Asian racism sentiment intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is of vital importance to develop students’ critical consciousness—that is, raising their awareness about structural inequities that affect communities of color and reimagining ways to combat racism via collective efforts in local, national, and global communities in mainstream schools, including Asian language immersion programs as well as in HL community schools (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Palmer et al., 2019). For instance, mainstream, world language and immersion, and HL teachers can adopt a wide range of multimodal, multilingual, and multicultural children’s and young adult literature that is not only created by Asian/Asian American and Canadian authors but also centers on Asian histories, contributions, cultural practices, and racial justice issues in class. Such pedagogical moves may open up opportunities for students to voice and name the racialized experiences of members from Asian communities and to brainstorm about ways they can take action in their own classroom against social injustices (Tian et al., 2021).

Further Reading

  • Lee, C. (2021). Understanding the oral and written translanguaging practices of emergent bilinguals: Insights from Korean heritage language classrooms in the U.S. Routledge.
  • Li, G. (2019). Languages, identities, power and cross-cultural pedagogies in transnational literacy education. Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
  • Li, G., & Ma, W. (Eds.). (2017). Educating Chinese-heritage students in the global-local nexus: Identities, challenges, and opportunities. Routledge.
  • Li, G., & Wang, L. (Eds.). (2008). Model minority myths revisited: An interdisciplinary approach to demystifying Asian American education experiences. Information Age.
  • Ma, W., & Li, G. (Eds.). (2016). Chinese-heritage students in North American schools: Understanding the hearts and minds beyond test scores. Routledge.
  • Werker, J. F., Abdul-Mageed, M., Byers-Heinlein, K., Chen, X., Curtin, S., Deancon, H., Joanisse, M. F., Li, G., Mangardich, H., Norton, B., Orena, A. J., Dexter, J. R., Rosenblum, D., Rvachew, S., Thomson, J., Turin, M., Tworek, H., & Yeung, H. (2021). Impact of COVID-19 on language and literacy in Canada. Royal Society of Canada.

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