Question

Please select one of the following questions and answer in essay format (one page, double spaced, 12 point font)

1) Read the case studies on Manuel Gomez (p.254). Examine the history of immigration to the United States from the Cape Verde Islands. How did the immigration to the US impact Manuel? What was Manuel’s experience in bilingual education? What can classroom teachers learn from Manuel’s education and home life?

2) According to Christina Igoa, “a recurring theme regarding the inner world of the immigrant child is a feeling of exhaustion, not only from the sounds of a new language but also from the continual parade of strange sights and even in a new culture” (p.235). As a classroom teacher, how could you try to alleviate some of the trauma experiences learning a new language?

3) According to Catherine Snow, “the greatest contribution immigrant parents can make to their children’s success is to ensure they maintain fluency and continue to develop their home language” (p.236). This quote contradicts common advice given to language-minority-students to “speak English to your children at home” (p.236). With research confirming the positive influence of knowing more than one language, why is there resistance to bilingualism? How would you use this information as a classroom teacher?

Answer 1

Answer 3 -

Parents who want to bring up their kids to speak more than one language can learn a lot from families who have been successful at bringing up bilingual children. However, I also think that a great deal can be learnt from those parents whose children grew up to be monolingual, as well as from adults who come from a bilingual family but only speak one language themselves. Below are the most common reasons I have been given for a child of a multilingual family becoming either monolingual or a receptive bilingual (aka ‘passive bilingual’):

1. “We didn’t really think about the languages”

This is perhaps the comment that I have heard the most often. As I have stated in another post, bilingualism does not happen just like that, unless the environment is ideal. In the perfect scenario, a child is consistently exposed to both (or all) languages and interacts with several people in them. Parents who are bilingual often admit that they thought their children would just naturally grow up to speak the family languages, in the same way they did themselves, so they didn’t pay much attention to how much their children were exposed to the different languages.

2. “We started too late”

Following from the above, when parents noticed that all languages do need conscious nurturing, they tried to introduce their children to the lesser spoken language, normally a minority language. Other families may well have planned to raise their children to become bilingual, but of some reason or other decided to wait with the introduction of the second language. In both cases, a change in the family language pattern is necessary – an easy thing to say, but a whole different matter to do in real life. (If you haven’t yet heard about Pricken, the Swedish-speaking kitten, you can read about my struggles switching to another language with my daughter here.) Several parents have said that they did not have the energy to insist that their children spoke a different language with them.

3. “Our children did not want to speak our language”

Many parents claim that their children did not want to speak their language at all. I say claim, because I find it a bit hard to believe that the resistance would have been there from day one. A child will learn the language a parent consistently speaks to him or her. The question to ask is what happened before the child started to refuse to speak the language. Was there enough interaction with the child in the language? Were the parents actually consistent, or was it more of a 50/50 split between the majority and the minority language?

Bilingual education is a classic example of an experiment that was begun with the best of humanitarian intentions but has turned out to be terribly wrongheaded. To understand this experiment, we need to look back to the mid-1960s, when the civil-rights movement for African-Americans was at its height and Latino activists began to protest the damaging circumstances that led to unacceptably high proportions of school dropouts among Spanish-speaking children—more than 50 percent nationwide.

English was not always the language of instruction in American schools. During the eighteenth century classes were conducted in German, Dutch, French, and Swedish in some schools in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. From the mid nineteenth to the early twentieth century, classes were taught in German in several cities across the Midwest. For many years French was taught and spoken in Louisiana schools, Greek in Pittsburgh. Only after the First World War, when German was proscribed, did public sentiment swing against teaching in any language but English.

In simplest terms, bilingual education is a special effort to help immigrant children learn English so that they can do regular schoolwork with their English-speaking classmates and receive an equal educational opportunity. But what it is in the letter and the spirit of the law is not what it has become in practice. Some experts decided early on that children should be taught for a time in their native languages, so that they would continue to learn other subjects while learning English. It was expected that the transition would take a child three years.

Jim Cummins, a bilingual-education theorist and a professor of education at the University of Toronto, contributed two hypotheses. His "developmental interdependence" hypothesis suggests that learning to read in one's native language facilitates reading in a second language. His "threshold" hypothesis suggests that children's achievement in the second language depends on the level of their mastery of their native language and that the most-positive cognitive effects occur when both languages are highly developed. Cummins's hypotheses were interpreted to mean that a solid foundation in native-language literacy and subject-matter learning would best prepare students for learning in English. In practice these notions work against the goals of bilingual education—English-language mastery and academic achievement in English in mainstream classrooms.

Bilingual education has heightened awareness of the needs of immigrant, migrant, and refugee children. The public accepts that these children are entitled to special help; we know that the economic well-being of our society depends on maintaining a literate population with the academic competence for higher education and skilled jobs.

Bilingual education has brought in extra funding to hire and train paraprofessionals, often the parents of bilingual children, as classroom aides. Career programs in several school districts, among them an excellent one in Seattle that was in operation through early 1996, pay college tuition for paraprofessionals so that they may qualify as teachers, thus attracting more teachers from immigrant communities to the schools.

The accumulated research of the past thirty years reveals almost no justification for teaching children in their native languages to help them learn either English or other subjects—and these are the chief objectives of all legislation and judicial decisions in this field. Self-esteem is not higher among limited-English students who are taught in their native languages, and stress is not higher among children who are introduced to English from the first day of school—though self-esteem and stress are the factors most often cited by advocates of bilingual teaching.

But whether or not the initiative passes, bilingual education has had a sufficient trial period to be pronounced a failure. It is time finally to welcome immigrant children into our society by adding to the language they already know a full degree of competency in the common language of their new country—to give these children the very best educational opportunity for inclusion.