Bilingual Bicultural Education

Even though Brown v. Board of Education ruled segregation in schools unconstitutional, it exists in a different form today. While the most students in schools are in normal classes, English Language Learners are often separated from the rest of the student body. These students, mostly hispanic immigrants, are put in special classes separate from the main student body where they are given special English instruction. They rarely interact with the main student body, and it often seems that they go to a different school. Dual Language Education solves this problem. In Dual Language Education, all students are taught together. This benefits both the English Learners and the English speakers both academically and socially and better

Around 1959, bilingual education took flight in the United States. Starting in Miami and quickly making its way San Francisco, bilingual education soon led to the Bilingual Education Act, which promoted “No Child Left Behind”. Only twenty years later, the act acquired the attention of high schools around the country. Nonetheless, bilingual education is not always taken to be the cure-all for acclimating immigrants to the United States. In his article “Aria: A Memoir of Bilingual Childhood”, Richard Rodriguez argues that students should not take part in bilingual education by explaining how it takes away individuality and a sense of family through the use of ethos, diction, and imagery; Rodriguez also uses parallelism and ethos to point out how a bilingual childhood can help students feel connected to society.

I taught for 25 years at an inner city school. My students were all second language learners, and often their parents were totally illiterate. I entered this career not as a teacher, but as a social worker turned teacher. The Los Angeles Unified School District was in dire need of bilingual educators, so they offered a district intern program where I took college courses while I worked in the classroom.

Bilingual Education where Supporters feel that students miss a great deal by not being taught in their family’s language. That children that retain their family’s language will retain a sense of individuality. Their ethnic heritage & cultural ties. Helping Students acquire the skills of a classroom crucial for public success. Rodriguez also discusses the use of teaching and using a single language.

People of all ages constantly learn how to speak multiple languages. Children are taught to become bilingual, which increases their knowledge. A young boy named Richard Rodriguez grew up in San Francisco, California with a household of Spanish speaking family members. Rodriguez barely knew English when he entered his early years of Elementary school. Through the course of his education Rodriguez took note of how different he was from his family, and slowly began to lose his heritage. Rodriguez’s family embarrassed him since he was categorized as a Scholarship boy, which means a good student yet also a troubled son whose moderately endowed (Rodriguez 19).

At the University of Washington a group of Chicano students started a movement in the fall of 1968 who wanted to fight for justice and were inspired to do so by such groups as the Mexican American Youth Association and The United Mexican American Students. Students in the Los Angeles area and in Denver were especially tired of the oppressive conditions tied together with the inability to make changes which outraged them enough to take their issues public with their demands for education reform. With the help of teacher Sal Castro, along with college students like Moctesuma Esparza, student leaders including Paula Crisostomo and such groups as the United Mexican American Students they presented the Board of Education with as many as thirty-six demands, which included smaller class sizes, revision of textbooks to include Mexican American history, Latino teachers and administrators, and bilingual, bicultural education. With the meeting with the Board of Education not going successfully and their demands not being met the students threatened walkouts, which they call “Blowouts”.

​The United States is a nation filled with a multitude of different cultures which come alongside with a variety of languages. These languages are what help society to communicate with one another and to expand their horizon of thinking. As the United States progresses so does the culture. The culture of the United States is no longer what it once was. A nation of a predominately Caucasian race, who only speaks one language, is now a thing of the past. The National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition (English Language Learners) states that from the 1997-1998 school year to the 2008-2009 school year, the number of English Language Learners in public schools increased from 3.5 million to 5.3 million which comes to be a 51 percent increase. They also reported that the overall student population grew to a 7.2 percent increase during this time. A huge generation of a multicultural society is rapidly growing and it is our responsibility as a nation to educate this new generation to its fullest potential. We as a nation can wither choose to ignore the reality of this new generation by forcing one language on students classified as English Language Learners, or we can choose to cultivate the knowledge of language so that this new generation may prosper in more ways than one. We do not want to become a society that promotes, as R.A. Berman summarizes in his statement from his article The Real

The video “My Bilingual Education” was about a female adult, who is bilingual, giving information about how she was impacted and what she went through when it came to reading and writing.

In the 1960s, Mexican Americans began organizing to address a broad range of issue of bilingual education. In New York, Puerto Ricans began to demand that schools offer Spanish-speaking children classes taught in their own language as well as programs on their culture. Latinos were demanding the right for school to teach students in their language because they feared abandoning Spanish would weaken their extinct culture. Additionally, women were excluded from education because it was believed that if women were well educated it would ruin their marriage prospects and be harmful to their mind. In this saying, Latinos were allowed to have education but it was the belive that a woman must stay home. Women with little education often believed that

Asylees are foreigners that have been admitted to the United States and are unable or unwilling to return to their home country due to persecution or fear of persecution. They need protection from persecution based on their race, religion, membership in a social group, political opinion, or national origin. They are capable of applying when they are in the United States or at a point of entry.

According to the US Census, 75 percent of today's immigrants learn to speak English during the first ten years after arriving. As now, not all immigrant students first made good work, but often suffered because their schools were few resources and attention given to their problems with the language was minimal. The study by Thomas and Collier, a comprehensive analysis of 700,000 minority students from 1982-1996, concluded that "only the enrichment bilingual programs long-term quality ... will give them minority students cognitive development and academic ... they need to succeed in English, and to sustain their successes as they reach high school grades. " A more recent study in Arizona in 2000 found that for three consecutive years, students

In the chapter “Bilingual and Bicultural Education for Deaf Children” learning English as a second language in schools was discussed and the criticism and benefits that come from it. I’m glad the Education Opportunity act talked about in this chapter includes the child developing a healthy identity and takes into account the psychological well-being of the child (295). There have been studies that suggest bilinguals have an advantage over monolinguals, and that they can analyze sentence structure better (297). It goes to show when given a fair chance, people can flourish. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the students were cognitively able, they just didn’t speak English. The idea of having a teacher who knows sign to teach deaf children English is amazing and I’m glad they tried to implement that in the classrooms. That was they

∙ Based on the FY97 Fall Housing Report, schools identified 118,246 students as being eligible for bilingual education services.

Having a father with hearing loss I know a little about hearing aids and some of the testing that people go through. I also knew that volume of the person speaking can be a sign of hearing loss, having a former employ and friend who are both loud and both have partial hearing loss. I did also know about the structure of the ear from biology courses and that hearing is measured in decibels. I did know that children with hearing issues are normal or even gifted but they just may struggle from the lack of hearing.

The philosophies how to teach deaf children in public schools have slowly made some transitions from the oral method to total communication to ASL by using the bilingual bicultural education. The bilingual bicultural education programs are using the deaf child’s native language and apply that native language to teach English. There are several bilingual bicultural education programs in the United States (De Vera & Dharer, N.D.) Bilingual bicultural education programs for the deaf are designed based on a special curriculum which includes the use of ASL as L1 and English as L2. One of the ASL/English bilingual strategies are codeswitching which is the most common strategy in the classroom during instruction (Nover et al, 1998). Codeswitching