The sixties in America were a time for significantly shaping the current nation into what it is today. Through the good and the bad, and many hardships, America became a melting pot and grew tremendously with immigrant populations. Many of the immigrants lacked the ability to speak English, so the war on bilingual education began. Bilingual education is defined as teaching students in both English and their native language. In 1968, the Bilingual Education Act, which recognized and offered education to students who were lacking English, was passed. Currently, bilingual education is a controversial topic. While keeping bilingual education in American public schools, the citizens of the nation are affected with cultural homogeneity, student education, federal spending, and child development.
Bilingual education serves as a welcome and segregation to foreigners in America. Peter Duigan, an author of immigration books believes, “Immigration
…show more content…
has made and remade this country. Not only do immigrants not harm America, but they have benefited it” (Duigan 5). The colonists were not the first people in this country, therefore, Duigan believes immigrants should be able to learn their origin while participating in the American life. Rosalie Porter, an author, believes that this type of education helps immigrant children learn so, “they can do regular schoolwork with their English-speaking classmates and receive an equal educational opportunity”, yet segregation occurs when students are set aside to learn differently and often fall behind, since they are learning two languages (Porter 174). Bilingual education separates the foreigners from the natives, leading the separated students in an uncomfortable environment, which can distract learning. With over twenty percent of school-aged children speaking another language than English, education has become difficult to teach, especially with a lack of certified teachers available.
María Estela Brisk, a Boston College professor, believes providing quality education to every student should be the main goal. Brisk states, “Bilingual teachers bring added knowledge and teaching and managing strategies that help increasingly multicultural schools” (Brisk 5). With each student coming from the same background, by setting a common ground, the students can become more successful with learning two languages. Benefits include strengthening the brain, better reading skills, the ability to learn a third language more quickly, and even the ability to perform higher on tests, than those who did not receive bilingual education. Students also have lower chances of Alzheimer’s and Dementia. Drawbacks also occur when students are not able to participate in the community as much since they are focusing on another language rather than
English. Some parents, such as Leticia Salais, a mother of a seven-year old, first deprived her child of becoming bilingual and learning a second language. Soon after he was around seven, Salais realized it was a bad decision. Many others in her tow of Tucson, Arizona speak Spanish and English. She states, “In a land of opportunity, I soon realized I made a big mistake. I was depriving my son one of the greatest gifts I had to offer: the ability to be bilingual” (Salais 172). Salais now is teaching her son Spanish, which is a lot of work and time-consuming, but she wants her son to benefit in the future. With learning the bilingual language, if students are taught around the right time and correctly, they can benefit, but many downsides can occur if started too late. The Federal government spends hundreds of millions on bilingual education every year (Peek 3). Many taxpayers do not support having to pay for education when a high percentage of students in this program are undocumented immigrants. Gregg Collins, a past writer for the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, understands that bilingual education focuses on teaching students math and reading in their native language, but he questions if they should only focus on learning English since they are in America now and not where their native language is spoken (Collins 5). A student’s past may be important, but looking into the future is more important. Although this program is expensive, the economy will be benefited into the future since bilingual students are often able go into a career that involves speaking more than one language. With students that are fluent in at least two languages, bilingual education creates a platform for students in the future to work in careers that require multiple languages. Ultimately, keeping or getting rid of bilingual language will have a positive and negative affects on the native speakers of other languages. With all of the positives that bilingual education has created in our culture, negative effects have also evolved for students, involving their cultural homogeneity, student education, federal spending, and child development.
Opinion Editorial By Hassan Abdi In the article written by Richard Rodriguez, Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood, he conveys an opinion that Bilingual education doesn’t work. He conveys it through his personal experience. Published by the Phi Beta Kappa to the American Society in 1981, the audience and his message are a broad and important now as it was thirty five years ago. As the amount of children that don’t speak English as their first language continue to rise, bilingual education has become a polarizing topic like most things, and for me, I am neutral on the topic. A form of bilingual education has failed me, but, for most students it benefits in the long term, and it 's not right to dispel one side of the topic to push your own
By the next decade, both the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unlawful to keep students who couldn’t speak English from getting an education. Later, Congress passed the Equal Opportunity Act of 1974, which resulted in the implementation of more bilingual education programs in public schools.
The reason I want to be a teacher is so I can make a positive impact in the lives’ of children similar to the teachers that taught me who impacted my life growing up. When I was six years old my family left Mexico and migrated to Greenville, Texas. The transition was challenging; I left behind everything I knew and was forced to adapt to a brand new world where I could not understand the language that everyone spoke. Luckily for me, Greenville had a bilingual program and I was placed in the classroom of Ms. Ramirez. I will never forget how she treated all her students, she truly is one of my biggest inspirations as to why I decided to become a bilingual teacher. Every time I stepped foot in her classroom, I always felt safe, secured, and
In Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez situates his individual experiences with education in such a way as to expose what he sees as the fallacious logic behind bilingual education and affirmative action. He uses arguments to propagate the systematic problems with such programs. His autobiography explains in great detail the entangling problems all American children face by instituting bilingual programs and affirmative action endorsements.
The legal and historical rationale of Bilingual Education has been around for quite some time and appears to a continuous issue with educators and political figures. Numerous articles have been written in favor and against Bilingual Education. The articles I read and summarized relate to some of the issues that have evolved from various proponents and opponents of how education should be presented to ELs in the United States. Summaries and a brief timeline of legislation up to the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) follow.
The Civil Rights era fostered a rejuvenation of the movement toward bilingual education. Amid with the desire of the nation to eliminate discrimination, the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 came into being. Certainly this act was at least in part the result of a growing num...
When I immigrated to the United States I couldn’t speak any English, so the Department of Education staff sent me to a school which only for the immigrant student and taught student with bilingual education. I only needed to stay in this school for one year because they only introducing student the fundamental English skill and the American culture. After one year, I would transfer to the local high school to continue my high school education but there was no more bilingual education. I believe that bilingual education school is good way for the immigrants to break the language barriers. I still remember that the first school day in the United States I was very afraid and nervous because I didn’t know any English and the American culture. However, when I arrived to the school I found out that there were a lot of student who came from the same country as I was, and some of the instructors could speak Chinese too. I started to not afraid of school and feel excited about my new school life. After I studied in this school for one year, I transfer to a local high school which didn’t have bilingual education, but I didn’t afraid my new school life because I already know how to communicate with other students. A program of bilingual education is a very good program that help immigrants student break the language barriers. As Richard wrote “A major study analyzed more than three decades of research, combining 17 different studies, and found that bilingual education programs produce higher levels of student achievement in reading” (Schaefer, 2015, p.96). However, “Attacks on bilingualism in voting and education have taken several forms and have even broadened to question the appropriateness of U.S. residents using any language other than English” (Schaefer, 2015, p.96). There are a lot of people come to the United States from many countries, and a
Bilingualism, a very controversial topic to debate in today’s United States. People generally define bilingualism as the ability of using two languages that individuals have. However, this is not the reason why that bilingualism becomes such a debatable issue. In this case, bilingualism is defined as the government’s use of languages other than English for public services in order to support the immigrants’ lives in the United States. People who support bilingualism want the government to continue having this kind policies. They think that bilingualism helps immigrants to assimilate into the American culture and moreover, it will unify everyone who are on this land. Although bilingualism provides some kind of benefits toward immigrants, they cannot solve the problems in the deep root. Bilingualism should not be continued in the U.S. Why? It reduces the immigrants’ incentive to learn English, threatens national unity, and costs so much.
The technique relies on a holistic approach that adopts instructions that allow students to actively participate in the learning process. This is easier for children that feel that the society appreciates their diversity through bilingualism and biliteracy. The society and parents need to encourage children to take up bilingual classes because they offer a lot of benefit to the society through favoring critical thinking, rationality, and sensitivity to other cultures, empathy, and detached or balanced awareness. However, Sonia Nieto mirrors a society that is made to fake being American and become ashamed of their family. It helps appreciate that it is not by choice that anyone speaks any other language as the first language and that the society and community influence the language of choice. Therefore, bilingualism cannot be detached from any community that freely promotes and accommodate the language spoken by the other community. Children and community members learn each other’s language without disregarding each other favoring effective learning that influences bilingualism and biliteracy in the long
When visiting just about any school across America, students who attend come from all over the globe. This raises the question across America about bilingual education. This can create many challenges in and out of the classroom. The classroom should be a safe place for all students regardless of what native language they speak. In the essay Lost in translation written by Eva Hoffman, describes a foreign student who tries hard to fit in. Instead, Eva begins to feel angry, hurt and confused because people laugh at her. In Guiding Principles for Dual Language Education by Elizabeth R. Howard, Julie Sugarman, Donna Christian Center for Applied Linguistics Kathryn J. Lindholm-Leary San José State University David Rogers Dual Language Education of New Mexico. Guiding principles gives great ideas to educators to stop kids from making other students feel the way that Eva felt. After reading several articles about bilingual education, it is evident that all children in school should learn English but never lose their native language. When all the students speak one language, students will be less likely to make fun of each other. A good educator should learn enough foreign languages to aid them in effective communication in their classroom although; if an educator does not speak a foreign language, they should recruit within the classroom students to be peer mentors. However, a teacher should be willing to listen and encourage the students. Above all a good educator should be a good role model to their students by respecting their heritage and their language.
From my experience, bilingual education was a disadvantage during my childhood. At the age of twelve, I was introduced into a bilingual classroom for the first time. The crowded classroom was a combination of seventh and eighth grade Spanish-speaking students, who ranged from the ages of twelve to fifteen. The idea of bilingual education was to help students who weren’t fluent in the English language. The main focus of bilingual education was to teach English and, at the same time, teach a very basic knowledge of the core curriculum subjects: Mathematics, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences. Unfortunately, bilingual education had academic, psychological, and social disadvantages for me.
Being bilingual always made my life differ as if I lived two lives, speaking Spanish at home and English everywhere outside of home. On the daily basis at my house, my family speaks Spanish. When we communicate we speak very fast, at times we can not even understand one another. After this occurs we all burst out in laughter super loud, no boundaries are enforced in our lexicon. The enforcement changes when entering a different discourse community.
...thousands of years. Generally, bilingual education can mean any use of two languages in school, by teachers, students, or both – for a variety of social and pedagogical purposes. It also refers to the different approaches in the classroom that use the native languages of English language learners (ELLs) for instruction. These approaches include teaching English, fostering academic achievement, acculturating immigrants to a new society, and preserving a minority group’s linguistic and cultural heritage. Building on, rather than just discarding the students’ native-language skills, create a stronger foundation for success in English and academics. Also, if students learn languages at a younger age, it will be easier to remember and learn them, rather than if they were older. It helps to learn another language for students, and can later be useful in the future.
Being bilingual implies a process in which everything looks so difficult at the beginning, but at the same time it is easier than what it looks like.
America, a country built on immigration dating back to the early 1600s Mayflower voyage, continues to thrive as a melting pot full of various cultures and ethnics. In the past, many immigrants came to America due to the offered freedoms and equality, yet today, many naturalized citizens suffer with injustices, including with educational practices. The use of bilingual education, which is teaching students in both English and their native language, has become a controversial topic. In 1968, the Bilingual Education Act, which recognized and offered education to students who were lacking English, was passed, yet the topic still seems questionable to some. Bilingual education provides a variety of beneficial attributes to equally help foreigners