Language Minority Experience: A Qualitative Study of Seven Bilinguals.

This study investigates language minority experiences of 7 heritage bilinguals via ethnographic interviewing and analytic induction. Themes are identified after qualitative clustering and contrasting of the data. Results are presented for all levels of participant-reported linguistic proficiency and researcher-inferred bilingual identity. Implications for theory building and counseling practice are discussed. ********** What comes to mind when hearing the words American college student? Counselors and other mental health professionals at U.S. universities are continuing to discover the diversity hidden under this familiar label. The distinction is most often made on the basis of such observable characteristics as race and ethnicity, overlooking the less obvious traits of gender, sexual orientation, bilingualism, disability, and so on (Sue & Sue, 2003). The danger is no longer in being blind to the differences, but in being nearsighted to the fine details therein, that is, acknowledging diversity within diversity (Phinney, 1996). Although a great deal of research and clinical attention has been devoted recently to the minority experience on college campuses, the phenomenon has been described in overwhelmingly black-and-white terms (see, e.g., Kearney, Draper, & Baron, 2005; Paukert, Pettit, Perez, & Walker, 2006). In fact, the word minority seems to have become synonymous with persons of color, often at the cost of excluding the other, less easily identifiable minorities. Bilingual individuals can be identified as members of one such minority group. Their experiences merit special attention, in particular, because of the cohort's increasing presence at American institutions of higher learning. For this purpose, this article draws comparisons between several minority groups. For example, individuals who identify as bilingual and biracial are paralleled. Persons representing these cohorts are hereinafter referred to as bilinguals and biracials, respectively. This space-saving convention is in no way meant to take away from their worth as individuals or to imply that a particular label describes them fully. Rather, we chose to highlight several apparent similarities in the minority experience of individuals who endorse membership in these groups. Therefore, the use of labels serves a singular purpose consistent with humanistic philosophy: to empower the individuals representing the minority groups in question by giving each cohort a descriptive voice. No studies to date have investigated bilinguals in colleges and universities as a homogeneous minority group (i.e., without specifying ethnicity, as in Hispanic bilinguals). Moreover, no definitive figure exists for the number of students who consider themselves bilingual, largely because of the current design of college applications that inquire only about race or ethnicity. However, according to the 2000 census, among the population at large, approximately 47 million people 5 years old and older "spoke a language other than English at home" (Shin & Bruno, 2003, p. 1). Most of those individuals--28.1 million--were speakers of Spanish, an unprecedented (for a minority group of this size) 61.7% increase since the 1990 census (Shin & Bruno, 2003). Other ethnic groups also showed rapid growth in the percentage of individuals speaking a language other than English at home (Shin & Bruno, 2003). Even if a modest percentage of these individuals pursued higher education, bilinguals would likely constitute a sizable minority group therein. As membership in this minority group continues to increase, one hopes that college mental health professionals will likewise improve their abilities to hear and understand bilinguals' voices. Whereas the higher education literature on bilinguals is lacking, we found a number of studies that investigated bilingual children, from kindergarten to high school (Gardner & Lambert, 1959; Giles & Byrne, 1982; Hamers & Blanc, 1989; Landry, 1987; Landry & Allard, 1992). …