Bilingual Education vs. English Immersion in California
Growing up in a Mexican household, I had the fortune of speaking two languages. The first language I first mastered was Spanish and then came English as I entered primary school. My hometown is predominantly Hispanic, and in the area I live in is mostly Mexican. When one drives around the cracked streets of East Salinas, one can feel the strong presence of the Mexican culture. On one side, one can hear the man in a cowboy hat blasting Banda music, and on the other, the bells from an ice cream cart pushed around by a man making children jump with joy. I call this place “Little Mexico” because it reminds tremendously of my mother’s hometown. The majority of people living in California
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Bilingual education is necessary and beneficial for students learning English. There are a lot of misconceptions about bilingual education being taught in schools. In article “Spanish/English Bilingual Children in the Southeastern USA: Convergence and Code Switching”, written by Daniel J. Smith, argues that Hispanic students placed in bilingual classes interchange Spanish and English words commonly in sentences whether it is verbal or written. He argues that code switching is common when children interact with other Spanish-speaking children. He states if English is enforced, there would be less code switching and more convergence in the English language. Smith believes that there would be less grammatical errors and the students would be less confused. Although this seems like a good argument, Smith never mentions in the article what the outcome will be if classrooms are switched to English only. When an immigrant has been in the country for such a little time, of course they are going to suffer from grammatical errors if they are barely starting to learn English. Students need to be placed in a classroom where the English language is introduced to them through their native tongue. Students can improve their English skills by this way of learning. For instance, when a high school student is required to take a language class like French, Spanish, or Japanese, English is still used to help those start dominate the language. It takes time for
Compared to other Countries, America stands less developed in bilingual abilities due to language requirements taught within our school systems curriculum. Being bilingual is an important skill to have in America, with multiple different prominent languages spoken within our country other than English, we are constantly surrounded by language. The problem that our country is dealing with now, is that we started with the idea that anyone that moved to America should adapt to our languages, instead of us Americans, taking the initiative to learn a new languages. In a report by Hyon Shin and Robert Kominski, showed the number of citizens in America that spoke a language other than English. The “data on speakers of languages other than English
Many community members think that if someone from another country wants to move to our society, they should come prepared. This leads them to the conclusion that we should not “Waste money,” on them. Also some say that it will distract other children and take away their precious learning time. For these reasons, some people say Bilingual classes are not needed at all.
I feel that the children will get confuse. “They feel, to begin with that part of the confusion around bilingual education program is their different meanings in different states.” (http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/259970/the_pros_and_cons_of_bilingual_education.html?singlepage=true&cat=4) I believe that children who doesn’t speak English won’t master English language, they will end up having low score in test and will prove that education is failing in their native and as well as their second language.
In the article, Speak Spanish, You’re in America!: El Huracan over language and Culture, Juan Gonzalez, a journalist and broadcaster of the daily show, Democracy Now, describes how bilingualism has impacted the United States’ modern education system. He describes an amendment that would constitute English as the official in the United States, which he believes can be a potential threat to the educational system. Gonzalez suggests that instead of having an amendment that constitutes English as the national language, American schools should implement Spanish to highlight the importance of being bilingualism in the American educational system. A constitutional amendment declaring English as the national language would be damaging to bilingual students because it would limit their capability of communicating in English or their native language, and therefore they have would fall behind in classes and will not succeed in the American educational system. To highlight the importance of bilingualism, even more the educational system should implement a variety of languages.
The greatest concern of mandating “English only” schools in California for example is that 80 percent of the population of students is Latino. Miner further explains, “Good bilingual programs are about more than learning a language, it should be about respect for diversity and multiculturalism (Bilingual Education, 1999).”
Many students who are English language learners come from a background were in their household they speak another language rather than English. This is why it is very hard for them to adapt when they are entering a school. According to the 1968 Bilingual Education Act, this act mentioned how English Language Learners faced problems and how they came up with educational programs to help students who were Spanish speaking students (Stewner-Manzanares, 1988, P.1). The Bilingual Education Act was put in place and with this act they wanted the federal government to deliver programs that would help students who were Spanish speakers (Stewner-Manzanares, 1988,
They leave school with frustration, insecurity, and the desire not to return. They wonder, as I often did, "Am I stupid? Why am I not getting this?" Having a bilingual education program would make school a more positive experience for many children.
The problem with both bilingual education and English-as-a-second language instruction in the United States lies in our unwillingness to treat English for non-speakers as an academic subject (Haas, 2007). While the bilingual programs in California are thought to be mostly for people who speak Spanish, there are also Asian students that need to be taught proper English before continuing their education. As one anonymous teacher points out: "I have had 32 different languages spoken in my classroom over a 25-year period. Eighty-four languages are spoken in our district."(Anon 1998 & Haas 2007). Which for most teachers mean that it is both educationally and economically impossible to teach every student in their own native language.
While America’s tongue speaks mostly English, the Spanish language can be found immensely spread across forty-five million people. In the American Southwest, while Hispanics may speak English, they maintain their tradition, their Raza, every day. Often times, this tradition is seen as a mixture of the two different languages better known as Spanglish. There is a large population of Chicanos and Mexicans in America, and it is important that they know and keep the customs and culture of their people. You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been. Hispanic Culture has had a major impact on America over each generation.
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
Firstly, some schools program are not really teaching English because all the kind of servers are available in Spanish language and the learner still speaking with their own language because they got every kind of help from their home language so, they think not need to learn English language if the school provide them anything from own language. Linda Espinosa said, bilingual education in California never worked University of Missouri-Columbia who knows work as consultant for California Education department she said children not become proficient in English language tended to lose their native language as well. for example, in the articles about “No Comprendo” by Barbara
When we speak about this country—The United States of America—we automatically think of the great number of languages people speak in this country. Take California as an example. It is one of the border states of America, and this state is made up mostly of immigrants. As a result, most people in this state are either bilingual or even trilingual. In order for the immigrant students to become integrated into this country, they must learn English, and Bilingual Education can help them assimilate faster to this new country. Nevertheless, people continue to vote against and ban Bilingual Education because they believe that if the student is here in America, he or she should be treated the same as the native speakers in order to save money and for him or her to better fit in. Even though many people criticize bilingual education, I personally am one of the supportive fans of it because Bilingual Education allows new immigrant students to learn English at a reasonable pace, assimilate to a new environment, maintain their academic specialties, and not to fall behind.
Even though many people supported bilingual education, there still people who are against bilingual education. According to an article, English program has an effect in the third generation. The first generation speaks native language, the second generation is bilingual, but not fluent in English, while the third generation is fluent in English and gets college degree (Rothstein 2). This meant that the English program id not for all people, it would depend on the race, and maybe intellectual. Some people might be able to learn English easier than others, for example the Hispanic because there are common usage of words called cognates that both languages have. By knowing one language, it is more likely to make it easier to understand the other
The most effectiveness of education that stood up for me is Immersion Bilingual Education. I have the same experiences as the example of second language learning. “One of the limitations of immersion bilingual education is that for some students, the second language can become a school phenomenon. Outside the school walls, immersion students tend not to use the second language any more than ‘drip feed’ students (Swain & Johnson,1997) (Baker and Wright, 2017 p.257). This is very accurate to describe how I was being as a bilingualism. For example, when I was in elementary school, there was always a group or a few of Chinese students that have the same classes with me, so if I need to ask question about homework, and I would just call them or
This paper presents a gap between current foreign language education policy and the English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching practices in addressing intercultural communication objectives in Vietnam. Although the current Vietnamese foreign language education policy advocates the intercultural communication aims, intercultural language teaching and learning has not yet been applied in foreign language classrooms. The findings from interviews, class observations and document analysis show that foreign language teachers mainly focus on developing learners’ linguistic performance rather than their intercultural competence because current policy statements about pedagogies and content of intercultural language teaching have not been explicitly expressed and communicated to foreign language teachers. The author suggests a bottom-up policy making process in which policy-makers and language teachers should both involve in addressing the pedagogy of intercultural language teaching.