One of the most iconic moments of a child’s life is the first day of school. Take a moment to remember the anxiety and excitement while spending your day in a new place, away from the comforts of home and usual caregivers, surrounded by new faces, new rules, new noises and an unfamiliar schedule. Now imagine arriving at that new school and discovering your classes are conducted in a language you don’t understand.
This is a reality many Spanish-speaking children in particular are experiencing this week in Arizona and across the U.S. as they begin an arduous transition from being monolingual to bilingual individuals. Learning a new language is always difficult. While it’s true that children have the best odds of successfully acquiring a second language, it appears that Spanish-speaking children in the U.S. are subjected to problematic education practices that interfere with their ability to successfully understand both the English and Spanish languages.
Education isn’t often a focal point of current U.S. immigration debate, but when the topic does surface, it’s a tense one. Bilingual education is controversial because it is often perceived as a way of “taking it easy” on Spanish-speaking students, obstructing their assimilation to the English-speaking world and generally threatening some abstract notion of American traditionalism.
Throughout the U.S., an exceedingly blind discourse often assumes the best way to teach English is to plunge young students into strict English-only curriculums.
It’s important to publicize how bilingual education actually functions within a school because its tremendous and proven efficiency has been obscured in the crossfire of immigration politics.
According to the National Association for Bilingual Education, the central goal of bilingual education is to help English language learners (ELL’s) learn English through utilizing, to some extent, the student’s native language as an instructional medium and conceptual platform. For example, if a child can identify parts of speech in his or her first language, it can be done in English more effectively, and this leads to higher literacy skills in both languages in the long run.
A 1991 U.S. Department of Education research initiative revealed: “the more schools developed children's native-language skills, the higher they scored academically over the long term in English.” Essentially, there is something vitally effective about using a speaker’s native language as a didactic springboard to their acquisition of a second language.
As a society that touts a deep value for education, we should critically take advantage of these findings as we create curricula.
The NABE and dozens of other journals cite hundreds of similar studies that exemplify how bilingual education helps ELL’s develop higher literacy levels in comparison to monolingual English schooling. So what is all the fuss about? Why is it threatening in any way to use Spanish to help young monolingual Spanish students learn better in schools?
A 1999 University of Michigan study concluded that, in general, the opposition is more political than empirical: “Though the United States has no officially recognized national language, some organizations and groups of individuals believe that the presence and use of ‘foreign’ languages is a direct threat to the traditional and esteemed role of the English language.”
Really, America? Really? It is reasonable to feel attached to spoken English as an American tradition, but it’s unreasonable to be inflexible in assisting others – particularly young children – to become part of that tradition. Bilingual children who can adeptly use two languages don’t deface national identity; they infinitely enhance it through an ability to communicate across rigid linguistic and cultural barriers, making it to our benefit to most effectively educate this population.
Send your comments in any combination of Spanish or English to abethancourt@asu.edu
