Bilingual bicultural education continues to be a complex social issue in the U.S. well into the end of the 20th century. Supporters of bilingual bicultural education charge that the mass media usually pay little attention to the field, and when they do pay attention, they tend to print mostly negative articles. Educators consider newspaper editors to be particularly biased when they write about bilingual bicultural education. / Newspaper editorials offer a public forum where controversial issues can be debated. Professional standards in the field of communications, e.g., Hulteng and Nelson (1971), require editors to use argumentation where all sides of a social issue are exposed so that readers can make up their own minds about a controversial social issue like bilingual bicultural education. / The research questions for this study are to ask (a) whether there are any editorials that espouse bilingual bicultural education, and (b) whether editors are exposing their readers to the 12 points in the argument that favors bilingual bicultural education. These 12 supportive statements are gleaned from the writing of educational theorists. / Since 1970, Editorials on File has been collecting U.S. editorials on sundry topics. In that 23-year period, there are 3 years where the selected editorials are about bilingual bicultural education. A computer program called Qual-Pro has been used to cull editorial sentences supportive of bilingual bicultural education in the 68 editorials of that period. / The results of the study are that none of the editors comes out in full support of bilingual bicultural classes. Of such statements in these 3 years of editorials, only 23% give even token discussion to the 12 points in the positive argument. Only 4 of the possible 12 points are mentioned--only 2 frequently, the other 2 somewhat frequently--and the other 8 points are hardly mentioned at all. The 2 points mentioned most often are (a) bilingual education is a legal right of minority students, and (b) bilingual education includes teaching in more than one language. The 2 points mentioned less often are that (c) bilingual education includes teaching about more than one culture, and (d) bilingual education has been and is now as asset to the nation as a whole. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-07, Section: A, page: 2492. / Major Professor: Frederick L. Jenks. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1993.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_76966 |
| Contributors | Frink, Randle., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 325 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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