A Comparison of Latin American and United States Bilingual Education Programs.

Bilingual programs and the socio-cultural circumstances surrounding the programs of the United States are compared with the programs and socio-cultural circumstances of three Latin American countries: Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. The legal frameworks are different. In the United States, bilingual education acts and subsequent programs came as a result of legal challenges by private citizens. In contrast to this, in Latin America the institutionalization of bilingual education programs began with the incentive of the national governments. There are differences in administration, goals, relative status of the languages involved, relative distribution of monolingual and bilingual populations, and cultural-historical backgrounds. In the United States a large number of different social processes are reflected in the various bilingual situations, while in the Latin American case, two historical factors are dominant. These differences mean that the socio-cultural attitudes that members of language communities have toward other languages and their use are an important factor in the stance toward bilingual education programs. Implications are discussed in terms of the final linguistic state of the societies in question and the degree of mutual versus unidirectional influence of the languages involved. (AMH)