The presentation addresses the disparity in language and literacy resources among Asian immigrant and refugee students and its implications for classroom instruction and policy making. Asian immigrants and refugees’ resource inequalities prior to immigration, compounded by assimilationist immigrant language and education policies, continue to shape their post-immigration resource diversity.
Asian students are often essentialized as a model minority who are “crazy rich” (Kwan, 2013), “highest income and most educated” (Lee, 2015). Contrary to this essentialized view, Asians in the U.S. have been found to be most divided in income inequality and academic achievement. In fact, Asians have replaced African Americans as “the most economically divided” ethnic group in the U.S. (Kochhar & Cilluffo, 2018). Recent analyses of disaggregated large scale state testing data such as those in California and Washington revealed alarming academic achievement inequalities (V. O Pang, Han, J. M. Pang, 2011). These inequalities suggest the need to reject a monolithic view of Asian students as successful, high-achieving model minorities. Rather, there is a need for educators to understand the complex learning needs that contribute to the different achievement trajectories of Asian subgroups. Building on my own work on both overachieving and underachieving Asian students and within Asian communities of various socioeconomic statuses and immigration histories in Norht America, in this presentation, I argue that both material and cultural resources available in the home, community, school, and transnational spaces affect Asian-subgroups’ language and literacy learning; and language teachers can learn to identify the potential resource assets and gaps in students’ lives in order to design effective instruction to maximize their students’ language and literacy learning in the classroom. I begin with a resource view on language and literacy instruction, followed by a contextual understanding of the structural inequalities faced by Asian immigrants and refugees. I then explain the relationship between the consequences of these structural inequalities and the children’s language and literacy learning. Finally, I consider the implications for teachers of Asian students.
