ESL and Language Planning in Puerto Rican Education

For nearly a century, the stated goal of government language planning in Puerto Rico has been the bilingualization of the island's population through use of English as the language of instruction or as a required subject in all school grades. Nevertheless, some 80% of the population remains functionally monolingual in Spanish. This study proposes that the apparent failure of the teaching of ESL in Puerto Rico is in reality a motivated failure—a society's successful resolution of a conflict between government planning for bilingualism and social pressure for monolingualism. Educational difficulties that for generations have been attributed to deficiencies in textbooks, methods, and teacher preparation are in fact explainable through universal principles of language maintenance, spread, shift, and loss. The factors that impede the bilingualization of the island's population—primarily nationalism, political uncertainty, and the association between language and identity—have created a societal imperative against the learning of English. The existence of such an imperative, whether overt or covert, must be considered by language planners, school administrators, and classroom teachers wherever language spread is attempted through the school system.