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As a consequence of the relatively few bilingual educators produced nationally and in California, there have been very few empirical studies that have addressed the preparation of bilingual teachers in the United States (Menken & Atuñez, 2001). In one of the few large scale analyses of the state's licensure data bases, for example, Menken and Atuñez found that only one-sixth of teacher preparation programs nationally provide programs to credential bilingual teachers. And yet researchers and school districts across the nation and the state indicate the importance of the linguistic, cultural, and pedagogic capital that bilingually certified teachers bring to the schools and communities that they serve, regardless of the type of instructional program type (Cantu, 2002; Gándara, Maxwell-Jolly, & Driscoll, 2005).
This special issue of Issues in Teacher Education-Preparing Bilingual Teachers-includes both theoretical and empirical contributions focused on the topic of bilingual teacher education, including but not limited to (meta)linguistics, (cross)cultural, pedagogic, sociohistorical and sociopolitical issues. As its central purpose, the issue will help fill the relative gap in the knowledge base in preparing this specialized group of educators through expanding the field's understandings of multilingual/multicultural educator preparation representative of some of the diverse language and cultural groups in the state of California. According to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (2015), over 800 bilingual authorizations were issued in 15 different languages; 732 (88%) were for the Spanish bilingual authorization. With increased demands for the growing dual language program offerings across the state, coupled with the 35% decrease in the supply of bilingually authorized teachers between 2009-2010, our state and nation is heading once more to a severe shortage of teachers and bilingual teachers in the near future.
Sociopolitically, the English-only drivers and forces that propelled the passage of Proposition 227 in 1998 have been countered in both the amount and quality of research that supports bilingualism and biliteracy, further validating what was known about the benefits of two languages for language minority and language majority students and adults. While early analyses of Proposition 227's impact on English Learners' academic achievement showed "no clear evidence to support an argument of the superiority of one EL instructional approach over another" (Parrish, et al, 2006, p. ix), research in fields such as cognitive psychology and neuroscience show...
