Language is a change agent that can contribute to, or limit a migrant student’s acculturation into a different sociocultural context. In schools, language policies for second language learners prescribe the types of education minority children receive and their levels of achievement; they are informative of the students’ self perceptions, they can either impede or promote children’s social acceptance within, and acculturation to the educational community; and they can organize opportunities for students to acculturate to the cultural constructs and the social norms of their adopted community. The major question asked was, how does a school’s language policy function to separate and how does it work to integrate majority and minority cultural groups? Semi-structured interviews (N = 54) included 33 teachers and six administrators. In part, the data revealed that the school’s language policy was not a useful resource the students could employ to access the sociocultural constructs of the school, to achieve recognition in the classrooms and hallways, and to acculturate to the norms of their new school. The goal of the policy making was to avoid marginalizing the new students, but the processes of acculturation were effectively disempowered through the inability of the policy to address the social and academic needs of the migrant students. © 1999 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

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