Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

[Special Issue On Sea Demographics] Response - Language Policy: Using The American Community Survey To Investigate Bilingualism And Biliteracy Among Immigrant Communities, Gerda De Klerk, Terrence G. Wiley

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

This article is a response to Mark Pfeifers Cambodian, Hmong, Lao and Vietnamese Americans in the 2005 American Community Survey and elaborates on the utility of the American Community Survey (ACS) for studying immigrant groups in the United States of America, and also compares the ACS to the U.S. Census. Neither the Census nor ACS questionnaire is structured to capture the language and literacy skills of immigrant communities in as far as these surveys only collect information about respondents oral language abilities, with a focus on English fluency. Direct, self-reported, and surrogate measures of literacy are discussed, with a proposal …