Abstract
The Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth was designed to be a definitive review of research on the literacy development of language-minoritized students. We adopt conceptual methods from rhizomatic mapping to replicate the report’s literature searches and critically examine studies eliminated based on the panel’s inclusion criteria. Our analyses demonstrate that epistemological bias disproportionately excluded small-scale, qualitative studies, and mapping citation patterns of scholarly impact demonstrates ongoing stratification and territorialization of scholarship since the report was published.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 231-248 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Bilingual Research Journal |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Some readers may question the relevance of an analysis focused on research published over ten years ago. In response, we note that no similar review of research has been undertaken in this field since the NLP report was published. Indeed, ten-plus years after its publication, the report continues to be cited regularly as authoritative evidence for “what we know” about English learners’ literacy development, and as a rationale for the questions and methods that drive new research in the field (e.g. Cummins, ). Its ongoing influence remains evident in education policy, including federal guidelines for ELL services under ESSA (U.S. Department of Education, Office of English Language Acquisition, ). Furthermore, the agencies that funded the NLP and delimited its epistemic stance continue to fund and disseminate scholarship that prioritizes experimental methods and positivist epistemologies. Recent efforts to reauthorize the Education Sciences Reform Act maintain this positivist orientation (National Board for Education Sciences, ; Senate Bill 227, ). Finally, despite several conceptual criticisms, no empirical evaluation of the effects of epistemological bias in the NLP report has been published to date and enough time has elapsed to conduct an empirical analysis of impact, which accumulates gradually over time.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 the National Association for Bilingual Education.
