Language Barrier: Bilingual Education vs. English Immersion Essay examples

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

More young americans nowadays are being raised in homes speaking non-English, but these students are falling behind in schools where there is not a bilingual program available. According to the U.S. Department of Education, in schools without a bilingual education program, 71% of English speakers are at or above the basic requirements for fourth grade reading while merely 30% of non-English speakers reach this level. 35% of English and 8% of non-English speakers reach proficient reading levels while only 9% of English and 1% of non-English speakers perform at advanced levels. It’s evident that the availability of a bilingual program is crucial to the success of an individual who needs the resources that can be given to them through the use of bilingual education. The percentages of the non-English speaking students previously mentioned could undoubtedly be comparable to those percentages of the English speaking students if the education they were being provided with was cohesive to their comfortability, and the material being taught was in a language they could better understand.

Bilingual education has been a debatable subject since its conception during the case of Lau vs. Nichols, in the early 1970’s. However, in that case, the court only ruling was that the children’s

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.

Movements for bilingual education rose in 1974 with the Equal Education Opportunity Act and Bingual Education Act, which ordered federally funded schools to meet special educational needs for students not proficient in English. Unfortunately, dropout rates and lack of English-language proficiency alarmed the states that these bilingual programs were not efficent. Because of this, arguments between English-only advocates and supporters of bilingual educations emerged. Articles such as the New York Times have proclaimed the failures of bilingual education. One cause could be the resistance of immigrants from English language acquisition, who hold tight onto their first language and culture. Despite this, studies show that generations

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.

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).”

Immigration, legal or not, has been a problem for the United States for a long time. In the U.S., promoters of bilingualism have supported the use of other languages for public services, including government documents, hospitals services, voting ballots, and bilingual education. In their essays “A Nation Divided by One Language” and “Viva Bilingualism”, James Crawford and James Fallows claim that it is not necessary to declare English the official language of the U.S. On the other hand, in their essays “English Should Be the Only Language” and “Why the U.S. Needs an Official Language”, S. I. Hayakawa and Mauro E. Mujica argue that English should be made the official language. They contend that

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 use of ethos, diction, and imagery; Rodriguez also uses

Rodriguez builds a formidable case against bilingual education with his bilingual childhood experiences. Rodriguez grew up speaking Spanish, but then learned how to speak English later in life so he knows what effects bilingual education has on bilingual kids who grew up speaking a private language at homes. When Rodriguez first came to the United States in Sacramento, California he understood “about fifty stray English words” (Richard Rodriguez “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood”). He was a Mexican immigrant whose family only knew how to speak Spanish. The neighbors of Rodriguez’s family didn’t like them, so when they were out walking they would tell Rodriguez’s parents “Keep your brats away from my sidewalk!” (Rodriguez 571). Rodriguez loses the “special feeling of closeness at home” when he learned English (Rodriguez 577). Personal experiences are what makes him a credible author. Rodriguez used strong ethos and pathos appeals, but he didn’t use strong logos appeals. He didn’t use facts or reasoning in his memoir to prove his points against bilingual education.

In the 1970’s bilingual education in Texas was just beginning to emerge. The topic was contentious, towards the end of the 1970’s however we see a shift in the topic, not advocating for bilingual education as it had at first, but looking at the results of bilingual education and the ways in which it could be improved. I will be analyzing the ways in which bilingual education was approached in this decade, focusing heavily on Texas but occasionally looking at the Southwest. Texas has always set the pattern for the rest of the country in terms of academics, by looking at the emergence of the bilingual education movement it will aid in the understanding of where bilingual education is today. The fight for equal education went through various iterations:

To many opponents of the bilingual education program that existed prior to these laws, encouraging bilingualism and biculturalism threatened the very definition of the American culture, which, they believed, promoted the values and language of a common group (Weisman and Hanson,2002). ). These proponents of the initiatives believed that new immigrants must abandon their native languages and cultural practices to fully assimilate into U.S. society. They feared that Spanish-speaking immigrants in particular had been "clinging" to their language and resisting learning English (Mora,2009).

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.

In this literature review I will be discussing studies that are in favor, not in favor, and neutral on bilingual education.