English language learning and trends of social inequality

Recent ethnographic studies of immigrant children and English language learning show continuing trends of low academic and social progress among diverse groups of these children and their families in spite of legal, institutional, and organizational interventions. This critical inquiry of the phenomena and possible causes focused on an analysis of distinct historical social contexts and correlative schooling objectives and practices governing the teaching and learning of immigrant children. The analysis (following what Stornello describes as "interdisciplinary historical excavation") identifies and establishes enduring tendencies that link the social management and control reorganization of schooling, which was heavily promoted as essential to the proper Americanization of immigrant children in the early decades of the twentieth century, to such emergent educational organizations in the latter half of the century as Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). Beginning in the late nineteen-sixties, TESOL quickly established the dominant praxis of English language instruction within the United States and internationally. The language of purpose and practice certainly changes, but this study shows that the values, attitudes, policies, practices, and motives of early twentieth century corporate capital, which undergirded the structural reorganization of public school education generally and of working class immigrants specifically, continue to richly condition public school pedagogy and practice in the present. Thus the historically persistent low academic and social progress among diverse groups of immigrant children points well beyond typical educational establishment explanations of individual or cultural peculiarities. These persistent group experiences point to the intimate interrelation between the classroom, English language instruction, and the stratified social reality of hierarchically organized positions of inequality.