A Sociocognitive Discourse Analysis of Monolingual Ideology and Bias in Special Education Partnerships

Translation of a Need into a Deficit

In McKnight’s view of service systems, professionals define a problem, prescribe interventions to address the problem, and self-evaluate whether the interventions resolve the problem. McKnight (1995) argues that this service process is patronizing and relegates clients to mere service recipients. As a service economy is self-serving, he assumes that professionalized interests remanufacture one’s needs into deficits to rationalize professionalized services. Professionalized assumptions that transform needs into deficits are manifested in the IDEA (2004). The IDEA adopts the term “limited English proficiency” (LEP) from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 (Sec. 602[18]), which is used to describe non-native English speakers ranging from school-age English language learners to their English language user parents. Given its emphasis on “limited” proficiency, the term LEP promotes monolingual ideologies and biases that undervalue bilingualism as a deficient language mode (Phuong, 2017). As official terminology referenced in federal law, the term LEP allows special education professionals to translate immigrant parents’ bilingual features and communicative needs into deficits. Deficit-based judgments of immigrant parents’ bilinguality and the resultant needs in monolingual English-driven communication can unfairly ascribe to these parents an inferior status compared with school professionals (Sridhar, 1994). Consequently, parents are denied the status of equal partners to professionals.

Internalization of the Perceived Deficit

McKnight (1995) critiques service systems for treating one’s needs as an individual problem: Once professionalized assumptions translate needs into deficits, the perceived deficits are internalized by service recipients. Professionals tend to view a client’s needs in isolation from contextual factors and rarely examine the larger problems that might drive the needs. By doing so, professionals are often unable to deliver effective interventions. The special education service system adopts a familiar frame, the medical model of disability, which views a perceived deficit as human pathology—a person’s biological or psychological condition (Skrtic, 1986). The medical model’s pathologizing view localizes the deficit within a person and offers remedial, therapeutic professional services to fix his or her innate deficit (Artiles, 2011; Harry & Klingner, 2014). Such pathologization perpetuates the deficit-oriented approach to immigrant parents and privatizes the parents’ circumstantial needs in the realm of personal deficits (e.g., LEP). Subsequently, professional language interpreting or translation services are provided to accommodate the perceived deficits within the parents. The provision of language services can be superficial when it disregards disadvantageous environments, such as monolingual English-driven communication settings, from which immigrant parents’ needs originate. When immigrant parents are demoted to recipients for another specialized service, school professionals are exempt from examining the extent to which their services account for the parents’ needs. Professionalized services intended to repair individual deficits, then, are seldom capable of reviewing whether their pathologizing judgments and remedies have definitional or measurement errors (Skrtic, 1991).

Specialization of the Service System

An assembly-line delivery of social service systems compartmentalizes needs into a set of manageable pieces and ascribes each piece to a corresponding professional (McKnight, 1995). Likewise, “the gospel of efficiency” of the service economy governs the special education service system (Tyack & Hansot, 1982, as cited in Kalyanpur & Harry, 2012, p. 7). Professionalized services tend to sort students’ needs into manageable units (i.e., categorical disabilities) and assign each case to corresponding professionals with specialized training (Kalyanpur et al., 2000; Skrtic, 1991). The specialization of social services also applies to language services that assist immigrant parents’ communicative needs. For example, special education professionals often subcontract technical assistance to language service professionals (e.g., language interpreters, translators). Once outsourced services intervene, special education professionals are no longer accountable for facilitating reciprocal and effective communication. McKnight (1995) warns of the detrimental effects of these specialized services, which can be demoralizing to people’s sense of connectedness and may supplant communal supports. The language services that were intended to complement the partnership process may adversely impede both school professionals’ and immigrant parents’ ability and efforts to build a democratic partnership. In particular, relying solely on specialized language services may undermine the civic engagement of school professionals in promoting linguistically equitable partnerships with immigrant parents. Special education professionals, who outsource language services, appear less likely to engage in either individual or collective endeavors to cultivate inclusive environments that ensure equitable communication access for immigrant parents, beyond recruiting language interpreting or translation services.

Search Procedures

This analysis examined peer-reviewed research articles published between 2007 and 2017 in electronic education databases, including PsycINFO and Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), to collect relevant discourses on special education partnerships with immigrant parents. The rationale for this year range is that we sought to identify changes in research trends or newly reported findings after the renowned literature review of special education partnerships with CLD families by Harry (2008). A keyword search was conducted using various search strings, including special education, culturally and linguistically diverse parents/families, partnership, participation, collaboration, communication, immigrant, and English. The search yielded 25 peer-reviewed articles from ERIC and 16 articles from PsycINFO, and a total of 16 empirical articles were included after checking for duplicated or nonempirical papers. Inclusion criteria were the following: Studies must have (a) preK–12 school contexts in the United States; (b) non-native English speaker immigrant parents or families; and (c) in-service teachers and special education personnel. Accordingly, exclusion criteria included the following: (a) native English speaking parents or families; (b) preservice teachers or preservice teacher training programs; (c) gifted program settings; and (d) outside preK–12 schools or non-U.S. contexts. Where the description of research participants and settings qualified for both inclusion and exclusion criteria, data were abstracted from each study and analyzed.

Hypotheses and Interpretive Analytic Process

Three hypotheses were involved in organizing the analytic process of the present study according to the genres, dimensions, and processing(s) of discourse. These hypotheses are based on the sociocognitive approach to critical discourse studies in Van Dijk (2014), which explains how individuals mediate between shared social cognition and actual text and talk. Relevant discourses were identified and extracted from a total of 16 studies’ written texts including both direct quotes from the original data (e.g., field notes, surveys, dialogues, interviews, observations) and processed data (e.g., researchers’ analysis, discussion, implications). The hypotheses provided three guiding prompts for the analysis: (a) how U.S. society constructs shared cognition of monolingual ideology and bias in its epistemic linguistic communities; (b) how shared cognition affects communication between in-group and out-group members of the dominant linguistic community of English; and (c) how individuals differ in processing monolingual biased discourses based on their distinctive linguistic memberships.

Immigrant Parents: Compliance and Self-Blaming Discourses

We identified a major discourse about immigrant parents that demonstrates parents’ compliance with the shared cognition of monolingual ideology and bias in U.S. society. This discourse indicates that immigrant parents in the analyzed studies rarely challenged the shared cognition embraced in the special education service system and its practices. Correa-Torres and Zebehazy (2014) provided an example of researcher-represented discourse that depicts how immigrant parents were assimilated into monolingual biased social contexts and were attuned to their communication expectations. According to the researchers’ restatement, “[Immigrant parents] recognized that English is the dominant language and did not expect professionals to know their language, but viewed their inability to speak English proficiently as a barrier” (p. 195). This example may convey how the researchers reconfigured accounts of the parents’ cognitive process of compliance. First, immigrant parents discover the power hierarchy between English and their home languages in the United States (e.g., identifying the English dominance). Then, the parents are socialized through micro- and macro-scales of interaction with the socially shared cognition of monolingual ideology and bias that habituates parents to the status quo (e.g., not expecting to use their language with professionals). Finally, while adapting to the ideological positionings derived from the status quo, the parents examine their agential liability in the participation in institutional practices according to the ideologically motivated and biased cognition. The parents experience linguistic insecurity (e.g., attributing their non-native English skills to an inability and a barrier) believing that they fail to conform to the expectations of English monolingualism due to their non-native like English proficiency and use (see Macaulay, 1997; Toribio, 2000).

Another discourse in a study conducted by Cummings and Hardin (2017) affirms a similar pattern and shows how an immigrant parent’s questioning of the exclusive use of English in individualized education program (IEP) meetings was discouraged: “A mom . . . stated that an interpreter attended at her daughter’s IEP meeting, but when asked if the IEP was in [the mother’s native language], the interpreter commented, ‘No’ . . .” (p. 122). The mother realized that professionals, including the interpreter, take English for granted as a communicative medium with non-native English speaking parents. Then, the parent stopped seeking further explanation and had a friend translate school documents from English into her native language. The IEP meeting in the discourse served as a site of language socialization that reproduces the macro-social order of English monolingualism via micro-interactions among language users (see Kulick & Schieffelin, 2004). The given discourse shows how language socialization occurred in two interactive ways: the professionals’ shared cognition of monolingual ideology and bias was transformed into institutionalized practices and the immigrant mother had to bear the burden of English-driven communication during IEP meetings.

Once immigrant parents complied with the monolingual English norms in family–school communication, the following self-blaming discourses emerged across parent participants with varying English proficiency levels: (a) “Since I don’t speak English very well, it was hard for me to engage in an in-depth conversation with teachers during parent-teacher conferences” (as cited in Lee & Park, 2016, p. 597); (b) “. . . more effective would be that I knew how to speak English” (as cited in Correa-Torres & Zebehazy, 2014, p. 196); (c) “I tried several times to go and speak with the teacher by myself, but it didn’t work. It was very difficult because of my English” (as cited in Lo, 2008, p. 80); and (d) “I couldn’t look up in the dictionary because I forgot how they were pronounced . . . Even though I am fully English speaking, I struggled a lot trying to understand” (as cited in Jegatheesan, 2009, p. 128). These self-blaming discourses that started with all the “I”s indicate that the responsibility for establishing effective communication was self-assigned to the parents. The discourses further inform ideological structures of such internalization that constrain the parents from recognizing, examining, or confronting linguistic inequities. During their contact with socially shared English monolingualism, which holds linguistic minorities responsible for their communicative disadvantages, immigrant parents default to self-blaming thoughts and behaviors (Ellis, 2006). Moreover, we could not track data in the analyzed studies that describe immigrant parents questioning the authoritative status of monolingual English in communication between speakers with different linguistic profiles or challenging the discriminatory selection of monolingual English as the communicative norm for speakers of other languages.

Studies included in this analysis provided discourses in which immigrant parents showed differences in terms of how they chose to improve family–school communication. For example, some parents desired to enhance their own English proficiency to become what they see as competent participants in communication with professionals. We extracted two interrelated examples, one researcher-restated and one parent-voiced, from Hardin et al. (2009): (a) “[Parents] wanted to improve their English language skills and placed less emphasis on interpreters than school officials [did]” (p. 97); and (b) “Above all, our greatest need is to learn English in order to communicate our ideas” (as cited in Hardin et al., 2009, p. 97). These parental discourses reveal how the socially shared cognition of monolingual ideology and bias effects immigrant parents’ engagement in perpetuating their own victimization of linguistic inequity. According to the first quote, when school officials stressed provisions for well-trained language interpreters for better family–school collaboration, immigrant parents considered their English skills as a target to be addressed. Although both the parents and the officials recognized the communication difficulties, they engaged in the problem-solving process differently.

More specifically, the parents in Hardin et al. (2009) located the origin of the problem in their multilingual competence (e.g., non-native like English proficiency and use), whereas the officials rarely related the communication problems to their monolingual repertoires. The parents then sought to resolve communication problems themselves by addressing their own perceived deficits (e.g., “our greatest need is to learn English”) above all other possible alternatives. The school officials, on the other hand, assigned responsibility to service systems for ensuring remedies (e.g., quality language interpreters provided by school districts). Moreover, immigrant parents remained collectively unaware of their participation in reproducing their own victimhood as indicated by the use of the term “our” repeated in the second quote above. As a cognitive consequence of the socially induced compliance with monolingual ideology and bias, immigrant parents could conflate their self-advocacy (e.g., advocating their ideas) with a self-exploitative method (e.g., via their improved English skills). Their seemingly self-determined or free choice to improve English skills over other emancipatory options to disrupt linguistically inequitable service systems could, then, revictimize them (Nagel, 2009).

We identified another discourse in which immigrant parents evaluated professionals’ insensitivity to non-native English speakers’ communicative needs. These parents challenged professionals to develop adaptive dialogue skills for the parents: (a) “School staff were speaking too fast and [a mother] requested that they speak more slowly so that she could understand what they shared” (Cummings & Hardin, 2017, p. 121); and (b) “[parents] wanted professionals to know that although the parents were fluent English speakers, they should not assume that parents can understand the technical terms commonly used among them” (Lo, 2008, p. 81). Meanwhile, some immigrant parents critiqued the current language services given by visiting interpreters and requested routine access to high-quality language services at school: “Although interpreters were available many times, they were not available all the time, which was a common concern for many of the families” (Correa-Torres & Zebehazy, 2014, p. 196). These researcher-processed discourses of the parents’ needs for better communicative supports do not conform to either self-blaming or revictimizing discourses. Rather, they refute the monolithic group representation of immigrant parents’ response to linguistically inequitable practices.

The disconfirming discourses discussed above reify in-group variances among immigrant parents across studies. Such interpersonal variances require extended research into the parents’ sociolinguistic demographic profiles (e.g., country of origin, race/ethnicity, immigrant status, English proficiency) that might affect individual differences. However, most research articles analyzed in this study did not have consistent measures to examine the intersectional dynamics that might emerge from the profiles. Meanwhile, the discourses cited above suggest possible intrapersonal divergence or cognitive dissonance within a parent’s processing of socially induced monolingual ideology and bias, which leads the parent to develop a counter-attitudinal advocacy. A counter-attitudinal advocacy occurs when people are prompted to advocate a situation contrasting with their preliminary ideas about the situation (Herak et al., 2018). For that account, immigrant parents can comply with English monolingualism against their original discomfort to the induced compliance. Inversely, parents can ask professionals to promote linguistically equitable practices while holding conflicting attitudes such as their emergent sympathies toward the induced compliance. This assumption, however, necessitates assessing the extent to which the parents were associated with the socially shared monolingual ideology and bias or gauging whether they performed contrary to or in conformity with the preliminarily induced beliefs when they participated in the studies. Moreover, the researcher-restated discourses extracted from the previous studies (e.g., Correa-Torres & Zebehazy, 2014; Cummings & Hardin, 2017; Lo, 2008) conflated and generalized over the participant parents’ initial statements (e.g., “parents,” “many of the families”). Therefore, we were neither able to trace individual parents’ intrapersonal variances in processing discourses nor verify their possible counter-attitudinal advocacy.

Professionals: Othering Discourses and Diffusion of Responsibility

One of the emerging discourses regarding special education professionals in the present analysis reveals that professionals seldom recognize their monolingual-biased practices or paternalistic approaches to partnering with immigrant parents. For example, Cheatham and Jimenez-Silva (2012) described a situation wherein an immigrant parent was struggling with the mechanistic and bureaucratic structure of parent–teacher communication. The parent and her daughter in the study were determined to advocate for the child’s transition to a kindergarten program. The parent tried to persuade the daughter’s teacher through subtle but persistent advocacy attempts “to sway [the teacher] from her recommendation not to move [the child] to kindergarten to no avail” (p. 179). According to the researchers, the described parent–teacher conference was conducted in English “at the request of the mother” (p. 179), although information about why she made that particular decision was not presented in the research article. Consequently, school professionals, the teacher and her teaching assistant, maintained their linguistic, conversational, and decision-making control, reinforcing the built-in power hierarchy between immigrant parents and school personnel in school systems.

The following researcher-interpreted discourses extracted from the study by Cheatham and Jimenez-Silva (2012) illustrate how linguistic and agential power asymmetries allowed the professionals to make decisions for the parent against her desire. For example, the teacher “responded primarily with vague explanations” and “denied [the mother’s] attempts to participate in the decision about her daughter’s future educational program” (p. 179). Other relevant researcher-processed discourses imply that the professionals neither accounted for their immediate communicative actions nor modified their dialogue in a responsive manner that would lead to ongoing cooperation with the parent. For example, the teacher often made statements that were “ambiguous and could be interpreted” in different ways (p. 179). The teacher’s statement of “I don’t know what we’re gonna do with her next year” (as cited in Cheatham & Jimenez-Silva, 2012, p. 179) could be interpreted either as an “admission” of the parent’s request or as a just general “compliment” of the child. Another statement conveys the teacher’s self-conflicting message against her original intent to keep the child in the current program next year: “[the child] would engage in challenging behavior at home if she continued in the current program next year” (Cheatham & Jimenez-Silva, 2012, p. 180). As a native English speaker, the teacher took advantage of using “indirect (and possibly confusing) language,” such as her use of the word “might” that would allow unclear inferences and her nonuse of “would” that might be confusing to the parent (p. 181), who has a non-native like sensitivity to English use.

Another trend of special education professionals’ discourse is that professionals separate themselves from any intermediate links in the chain of communication difficulties. In doing so, they relate immigrant parents and their bilinguality (e.g., non-native like English proficiency) to the difficulties. Hardin et al. (2009) reported that professionals (e.g., school administrators and teachers) and immigrant parents reached an “agreement that language was the primary barrier during the referral process” (p. 96). To alleviate the barrier, school professionals “suggested that schools districts hire and train more bilingual teachers and specialists to assist families” (p. 97). The professionals “felt that language barriers prevented parents from providing schools with critical information” (Hardin et al., 2009, p. 97). They identified other factors that may hinder family–school communication in immigrant parents: “Administrators felt it was sometimes difficult to build trust because of the illegal status of family members . . . because some parents did not fully understand the purpose of the referral process or because of differences in cultural beliefs” (p. 97). The administrators recommended parent education classes as well.

The researcher-processed discourses of the professionals above reveal that professionals’ awareness of language barriers and their efforts to promote parental participation are built upon the binary oppositions between them and the parents. According to Van Dijk (2004), people tend to distinguish themselves (e.g., we, us, ours) from others (e.g., they, them, theirs) based on in- or out-group memberships in an epistemic social community. Once the polarized memberships in ideological discourse structures are constructed, the affiliated members of a social group embody othering attitudes in their discourse processing against out-group members (Van Dijk, 2014). School professionals’ othering stances and practices described by Hardin et al. (2009) can be situated within the ideological positioning and biased discourse processing as follows: (a) centering the language barriers to their (immigrant parents’) linguistic diversity not to our (professionals’) monolingual practice; (b) expecting them to provide us with information by overcoming their language barriers with other specialized professionals’ language intervention, who are hired to assist them; and (c) holding them accountable for causing partnership issues with us (e.g., their illegal status, lack of understanding of the referral process, and different cultural beliefs), which requires educational classes for them, but exempts us from reviewing our belief systems that criminalize undocumented residents, our insider advantages of operating the referral process, and our expectation of unilateral assimilation of their cultures into ours.

The othering discourses of professionals lead to the reductive process of diffusing responsibility among special education professionals. After locating the cause of communication breakdown within immigrant parents, school professionals assign language service providers (e.g., interpreters, translators) to address the perceived deficits of the parents (e.g., LEP). Ideally, school professionals should remain responsible for promoting linguistically equitable communication with immigrant parents—regardless of the presence of language service providers (Cheatham & Lim-Mullins, 2018). School professionals present in the majority of studies that we analyzed, however, neither examined themselves as possible sources of communication difficulties nor associated themselves with the situations in which the quality of language services determines the overall partnerships. Subsequently, language service providers became the only responsible agents for addressing communication difficulties, which led the following situations to occur across studies: (a) “When interpreters were not available, meetings were canceled or paraprofessionals or family members were used (Correa-Torres & Zebehazy, 2014, p. 196); (b) those “who [parents with no or low English proficiency] used interpretation services reported that they depended on interpreters entirely during communication with the professionals” (Jegatheesan, 2009, p. 128); and (c) “I [an immigrant parent] prefer to learn English instead of using interpreter services. I am confident that if I learn enough English I can do a better job [than those interpreters that she was assigned]” (as cited in Jegatheesan, 2009, p. 129).

Hardin et al. (2007) reported a distinctive response of professionals that leads to self-reflective discourses. Namely, professionals’ self-involvement in improving their own plurilingual competence was identified in the study: “Many respondents [school administrators] indicated they were attempting to learn a second language themselves. Training in . . . other prevalent languages could mean more bilingual professionals, which would greatly enhance communication for . . . families during the referral, evaluation, and placement process” (p. 53). Banerjee and Luckner (2014) also showed a similar pattern of school professionals’ self-awareness of their role in promoting effective communication with immigrant parents. For example, some early childhood educators, who were 31% of professional participants, admitted that their own incapability to communicate effectively with linguistically diverse families is the most significant challenge. However, despite their self-reflective recognition of ineffective communication, the majority of professional participants in the study did not problematize the dominance of monolingual English over multilingual communication: Only 6.4% of the participants were interested in training in how to collaborate with a language interpreter or translator and 4.8% of the participants required preservice professionals to learn other languages for more effective communication with immigrant parents.

Researchers: Gatekeepers in the Recontextualization of Parent–Professional Discourses

The current analysis primarily involves forming reader meaning—our (the authors of the current study) interpretation of present discourses written in the research articles. The present discourses refer to the texts that reflect on researchers’ recontextualization of original discourses collected from research participants. Thus, examining how researchers transformed discourse meaning from the original partnership contexts into writer meaning (i.e., researchers’ remanufacturing of the original discourse meaning) is a critical part of the current study. The way in which researchers represent the initial nuances, intents, or circumstances of research participants’ discourses through the researchers’ own evaluative interpretation guides the future development of discourse (Van Dijk, 2014). We traced researchers’ intersectional trajectories across their reporting of participant-voiced discourses and their reprocessing of the emerging discourses. The current analysis of published research articles identified that cited researchers were heavily engaged in reifying the shared cognition of monolingual ideology and bias as an object of discourse obtained from research participants. Researchers play gatekeepers’ roles in recontextualizing parent–professional discourses throughout the conversion process of research participants’ intended discourses into researcher-interpreted discourses and, eventually, into research-based knowledge. The present study also found that researchers in the analyzed studies positioned themselves or were viewed by interacting research participants, as neutral, invisible, or disinterested figures.

According to Cummings and Hardin (2017), for example, participant parents identified the following kinds of service providers as professionals: “teachers, interpreters, medical doctors, community agency staff, early interventionists, developmental therapists, speech therapists, and physical therapists” (p. 121). It is noteworthy that researchers were not included in the list of service professions even though they might be part of schoolwide service teams and were occasionally in contact with immigrant parents for research purposes. In fact, researchers were commonly not identified as interacting with parents or professionals in discursive contexts across studies analyzed in this study. Based on critical discourse studies’ emphasis on a discourse position, “the ideological position from which subjects participate in and evaluate discourse” (Jager & Maier, 2016, p. 124), we included all stakeholders of special education partnerships research in the present analysis. Accordingly, the study extended the traditional boundaries of special education partnerships, which typically include immigrant parents and school professionals, to involve researchers who take up the veiled discourse positions. The extension led the study to capture researchers’ reconstruction of research participants’ actual talk and text as another focal subject of discourse, which is neither unbiased nor objective.

The current analysis identified that researchers seldom articulated information regarding their own linguistic demographics (e.g., monolinguals, bi/multilinguals) as well as their social status (e.g., U.S. citizens, im/migrants) in their partnership research reports. Researchers’ discourse positions are grounded in their sociolinguistic profiles, and the related memberships significantly affect transforming a researcher-represented discourse into research-based knowledge (Van Dijk, 2016). The studies discussed in this analysis, however, rarely identified how the discourse positions of researchers relate to their research relationships, practices, or outcomes. A critical review of researcher-reconstructed discourses requires information that discloses researchers’ positionality and reflexivity as sociolinguistic beings. Such information is necessary to validate the discourses presented in the research articles along with the following questions: (a) what if researchers (including the authors of the current study) were inclined to patterns of observed discourses that confirm their own biased cognition? (b) what if they were convinced of certain kinds of positivity or negativity in some participants due to the participants’ membership in the researchers’ own affiliated groups? and (c) what if they detected data that they were looking for even though the evidence was circumstantial? Yet, we were unable to locate researcher information that is sufficient to answer these questions in the cited research articles. The identified lack or omission of researcher information calls for extensive analysis of researchers’ discourse positions in special education partnerships research.

Van Dijk (2016) developed an ideological square, which represents a schematic model of binary oppositions between self and others, or us and them. This model is a useful tool for reviewing one’s discourse positioning, such as the unrecognized gatekeeper role of researchers in discursive contexts. The square consists of double and contrasting strategies: proposing positive self, in-group descriptions and negative other, out-group descriptions while de-emphasizing negative self, in-group representation and positive other, out-group representation (Van Dijk, 2016). The square refers to the ideological structure of between-group conflicts manifested in othering discourses. If situating researchers within the square, researcher-reproduced discourses become another discursive event that should be established through the researchers’ affiliated group-basis virtues, doctrines, or worldviews. The extended analysis of researchers’ discourse position, then, entails reviewing the researchers’ self-descriptions of their own sociolinguistic identities or “identification”—one of the critical categories of ideological discourse structures (Van Dijk, 2016, p. 73). Identification, here, refers to how members of social groups identify themselves with their affiliated group and how they present their identities in various ways during their discourse processing(s). The current study confirmed that most researchers provided identification for research participants in their studies (e.g., an immigrant mother from Mexico, immigrant parents whose native language is Spanish, Chinese mothers with low English proficiency). However, those researchers rarely articulated any details of their own sociolinguistic identification in their research articles.

Concerning researchers’ recontextualization of discourses, there is a need for investigating how researchers reframe communication difficulties as a cultural matter. The present analysis identified researcher-constructed discourses that adopted a cultural lens that centers language-related communication problems on cultural awareness: (a) “Professionals and CLD parents are likely to blame communication difficulties on the other person, rather than attributing misunderstandings to cultural differences, thus contributing to a cycle of misunderstanding that limits meaningful communication . . .” (Tamzarian et al., 2012, p. 2); and (b) “Beyond language barriers, . . . cultural misunderstandings [between home and school] may lead to over-representation or the provision of services that fail to meet children’s needs” (Steeley & Lukacs, 2015, p. 20). Moreover, the current study found researcher-led discourses that extended cultural discourses toward a more critical and comprehensive analysis beyond the cultural mismatch framing. The following discourses demonstrate the complexity of partnership issues in the special education service system: (a) “Due to the cultural differences, language barriers, incapability of navigating the healthcare system, and limited resource connection, participants found it difficult to find help” (Wang & Casillas, 2013, p. 601); (b) “the risks are all the greater for immigrant families who face language and cultural barriers, in addition to the official barriers of school expertise presented in a manner that is less-than-accessible to parents” (Steeley & Lukacs, 2015, p. 29); and (c) “Greater attention is needed to preparing professionals and establishing educational systems that value culture, language, and experiential differences while producing resources, tools, and collaborations” (Banerjee & Luckner, 2014, p. 45).

Redefining Immigrant Parents’ Bilingualism for Linguistic Equity

This analysis posited three interrelated discourses emerging from the literature. The first discourse affirmed immigrant parents’ adaptive compliance to the monolingual English biased practices in special education. Immigrant parents’ tendency to devalue their bilinguality, coupled with self-blaming discourses, conformed to the shared beliefs and behavior patterns of English monolingualism in the service system. Rather than challenging the legitimacy of monolingual settings in communication, some parents adjusted themselves to the monolingual biased expectation that sets native speaker competence as the benchmark for late bilinguals. Those parents, who prefer to improve their English proficiency as a resolution, however, might not be aware of linguistic inequities in monolingual biased communication and mistreatment imposed on them. Once immigrant parents abide by such discriminatory practices, they may perpetuate their own oppression without knowing or claiming their linguistic rights. As Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas (1994) argued, all individuals are entitled to a safe, inclusive linguistic environment as a basic human right. Enabling language minorities, such as immigrant parents, to function with their native languages and bilingualism in family–school communication is, thus, necessary to secure linguistically equitable partnerships.

To do so, the field of special education needs a paradigm shift in its understanding of bilingualism in globalized communication settings in U.S. schools. The shift starts from an acknowledgment that bilinguals are fundamentally different from monolingual English speakers in terms of their language competence in English (Zurer-Pearson, 2010). The difference is not the manifestation of inferiority or superiority but the normal state of the human mind in second-language acquisition (SLA; Cook, 2012). SLA research has consistently indicated that late adult bilinguals with few exceptions never acquire native-like control or fluency in their second language (May, 2011). Thus, although parents attempt to satisfy the native speaker norms or to improve on a perceived deficiency (e.g., LEP), they may not achieve such linguistic goals and build negative self-concepts as bilinguals. According to Felson (1985), individuals develop their self-concept based on their perceptions of the way others are responding to them. This reflected appraisal process portrays how the monolingual biased cognition embedded in the special education service system deteriorates immigrant parents’ bilingual self-concept. The deficit-oriented reflected appraisals on bilingualism can be upended to promote immigrant parents’ self-concept not only as multilingual users but also as equal partners of professionals.

Reenvisioning Professional Practices in Linguistically Equitable Partnerships

The present analysis of published research articles also affirmed that school professionals tended to act on monolingual-biased cognition when they encountered immigrant parents’ bilingual features and subsequent needs in communication. This tendency leads school professionals to seek outsourced language services. As Harry (1992) argued, however, immigrant parents’ bilinguality may not be a direct cause for communication difficulties. When the special education system takes monolingual-biased cognition for granted, most school professionals are privileged over immigrant parents based on their dominant social status (e.g., U.S. heritage born citizens, legal residents) and linguistic memberships (e.g., native English speakers). These school professionals, then, operate monolingual-biased practices as a way of confirming the status quo (e.g., their linguistic, conversational, and decision-making advantages) in communication with immigrant parents. School professionals may also separate themselves from possible sources of communication difficulties and assign language service providers (e.g., interpreters, translators) to accommodate immigrant parents’ communicative needs. The original intention of interprofessional collaboration with language service providers is to assist both school professionals and immigrant parents (see IDEA Part B’s provisions). Thus, the collaboration should not be misused to exempt special education professionals from civic responsibilities to secure linguistic equity in democratic partnerships with immigrant parents.

Mitigating barriers that inhibit parents’ active participation in their children’s education is a school site’s responsibility (Blue-Banning et al., 2004). The current study echoed a need for reenvisioning professional roles and responsibilities in reciprocal partnerships with immigrant parents. Special education professionals may benefit from looking at how international business responds to increasingly globalized partnership contexts in which speakers with various linguistic profiles use English as a lingua franca to seek mutual interests. In international business communication, native English speakers voluntarily accommodate non-native English speaking partners’ needs by adopting a wide range of linguistic strategies and modify their speaking patterns according to the needs (Sweeney & Hua, 2010). Communication negotiations are, thus, largely determined by native English speakers’ willingness and ability to optimize English-centered communication settings for non-native speakers of English (Nickerson, 2005). If native English speakers do not use various strategies and skills to adjust their speaking for non-native speakers, the fault of ineffective communication also lies in them and not solely in non-native English speaker partners (Seidlhofer, 2001). While for-profit business is willing to address multilingual repertories and communicative needs, how special education service systems advocate for and endorse the emerging needs as a civic venue is a critical matter.

Reinforcing Researcher Reflexivity and Positionality in Partnership Research

Grounded in the cognitive context models of discourse (Van Dijk, 1997), we set up three hypotheses regarding the genres, dimensions, and processing(s) of discourse to guide our analysis. As these hypotheses situated the analytic process within the different sociolinguistic profiles and memberships of the authors, we were able to negotiate our (dis)agreement that often or iteratively occurred during extracting, interpreting, or synthesizing the data. Specifically, the first author, who led the individual and collaborative analysis phases, deliberately structured three discourses that represent immigrant families, school professionals, and researchers. As a non-native English speaking, immigrant parent herself, she intended to extend the attention of special education partnership issues to all participating individuals of the shared cognition of monolingual ideology and bias. The second author, who is a U.S. heritage born, native English speaker and parent, ensured ongoing member checking throughout the analysis. He addressed disconfirming data and added more examples and analyses to balance the discourses of school professionals and researchers compared with that of immigrant families.

The analysis identified insufficient information on scholarly processing of discourse in the published research articles. Readers need such information to examine the trustworthiness of the scholarly discourses presented in research reports. The majority of the data in this analysis are derived from qualitative studies, which are arguably based on ethnographic approaches using in-depth interviews, one-on-one or focus group interviews, or naturalistic observations. This line of research comprises researchers’ recontextualization of a discourse, which can trigger a change of meaning from what research participants originally proposed or expressed (Van Dijk, 2014). If a partnership research report includes more specific references that articulate researchers’ positionality and reflexivity in relation to their sociolinguistic profiles, its readers can critically inspect researchers’ knowledge production using the following prompts: How researchers’ positionality regulates the researchers’ interpreted discourses of participants’ intended discourses; and how researchers’ reflexivity is involved in transforming the process of researcher-represented discourse into research-based knowledge in the literature.