Dual language (DL) education is a rapidly growing program model in the U.S. and the majority of the programs are Spanish-English programs that serve Latinx students, both those who are classified as English learners (Els) and those who enter as bilingual or English dominant (Howard et al., 2018). Over the past twenty years, the U.S. has seen a ten-fold increase in the number of dual language (DL) programs (Gross, 2016). While there has been considerable research documenting the ability of these programs to promote academic achievement and bilingualism and biliteracy, there is a notable gap in the research base on the third goal of sociocultural competence (SCC) (Feinauer & Howard, 2014). The rapid increase of these programs and their embrace by white, affluent, English-speaking parents has led to criticisms of the programs as being elitist and biased towards the interests of the dominant culture and failing to serve the needs of students of color in general and English learners (ELs) in particular (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Flores, 2016). These scholars have called for programs to respond to the cultural needs of minoritized students and interrogate the power dynamics that may be influencing program design and outcomes. This call aligns with the goal of SCC, which is the least well-defined and therefore the least understood by practitioners, policymakers, and researchers alike, leaving teachers with little guidance about how to help students develop competence in this area. However, as the rising criticisms of DL education point out, this lack of attention to the so-called 'third goal' (Feinauer & Howard, 2014) may seriously undermine the ability of DL programs to meet the other two goals, and to do so in a way that is equitable for all students rather than skewed towards the needs of students from the dominant culture (Feinauer & Howard, 2014; Franchino, 2020). Thus, we argue that SCC should be reprioritized as the first goal of DL programs because it supports the whole student's well-being, and is likely to be the driver of bilingualism and biliteracy as well as other academic outcomes in a way that promotes equity for all students, particularly those classified as English learners (ELs) and other historically marginalized groups.
Here we share the Dual Language Assessment of Sociocultural Competence (DL_ASC), an individually administered measure for dual language students in grades 3-6. The measure takes into account aspects of criticality and critical cultural awareness in the transformational DL education framework (Freire, 2014, 2020), which also seeks to help students sustain their identities through a social justice stance; culturally sustaining pedagogy, which seeks to affirm and incorporate the resources of students and their families into pedagogical practices, thus centering historically marginalized voices in the classroom (Paris & Alim, 2017); the Social Justice Standards ("Social Justice Standards", 2018); the Council of Europe's Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC, COE, 2016); and related literature. We describe the different phases of measure development using the Rasch-Guttman Scenario Scales (Ludlow et al., 2020).
