Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Lascarides & Hinitz (2000)- Chapters 17-18
In the text, the authors discuss the history of bilingual education in the United States. Describe the events that influenced our country's ideas about bilingual education during different historical periods. In addition, do you believe that this movement is a cycle or a trend in education?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
In the text, the authors discuss the history of bilingual education in the United States. Describe the events that influenced our country's ideas about bilingual education during different historical periods. In addition, do you believe that this movement is a cycle or a trend in education?
I found an interesting article by Carlos Ovando of Arizona State University
According to Ovando (n.d.), the history of bilingual education in the United States began long before the colonists came to North America. The Native Americans had their own languages numbering around one thousand and a wealth of culture, myths, and ideologies.
To add to this mixture of languages were also Mexico, and South American languages. The myth today is we are a bilingual country, when the reality is we have always been one (Ovando).
The founders of America as we know it envisioned our country as a unified one rich with our own history and cultures. Therein the problem begins. Even in antiquity Latin was taught. The issues of bilingual education coming to the forefront today are really masked by ignorance of past history. The founders of America set no formal standard of language, in other words English was never really adopted as an official language, although it may well be one now.
However, today we ponder what strategies are needed to educate the children from other countries and assimilate them into our language or should we learn theirs as well. A rich opportunity for embracing cultural diversity exists in the larger community of neighborhoods and schools.
I see bilingual education as a trend. The pressure today is focused on illegal immigration and prior to that time, bilingual education was just an extra class you took to graduate.
Polices for immigrants are been relatively tolerant in previous years and policymakers are uncertain as to how to address this and historically the information is interpreted differently.
Americans tend to isolate cultures, values and beliefs or others, so perhaps this interest (trend) due in large part to media coverage, misinterpretation of historical facts and insensitivity to the Other may one day result in some great things being done in classrooms across America.
The overall point of education to minorities of other language is Americanization, to help them shed their differences and create conformity at the price of their language and culture. Wars seemed to help shape our policy and draw us more diligently as a nation to enculturate the masses. However , the Chinese combat this by having their own Chinese school in which they send their children after public school. They seek to keep the language and culture strong. Another contributor from history is the waves of immigration and the dispersion of ethnic groups in the United States. The later waves tended to group together in neighborhoods creating strongholds of culture and language as oppose to earlier waves. The one thing I think those Americans who feel entitlement and superiority forget is that at one point their family was an immigrant too.
I believe that bilingual education is a cycle. The processes of teaching in English or in their native language is like a pendulum that swings from far right to far left. Though more research is finding that competency in L1 leads to greater effectiveness in learning L2. This cycle was be on it’s way out with consist research findings.
Bilingual Education in the United States
The endorsement of bilingual education has cycled in and out of favor in the United States. According to the Lascarides & Hinitz (2000), various historical factors influenced society’s opinion of the importance of bilingualism.
During the colonial period, several schools provided bilingual programs for children. Children in New England grammar schools had the opportunity to learn Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Often students used texts similar to the books created by Comenius, who encouraged using a child’s first language to learn a second language. In addition, colonists from Germany, as well as other countries, established bilingual programs for their children by establishing schools with instruction in both languages. Native Americans during this time, especially in New England, were encouraged to become bilingual to help colonists correspond with other non-English speaking members of this community. Although bilingualism was encouraged throughout this period, one group of new arrivals to this country was not part of this movement. Owners of slaves often would not allow them to speak their native tongue and forced them to learn English.
Despite this approval of bilingual education during the colonial times, this attitude slowly began to change in the upcoming years. For example, after the Civil War, bilingualism for Native Americans started to fade. The goal during this period was to assimilate this group of people into American society. This process included not only learning English without the support of the first language but also an emphasis on converting Native Americans to Christianity.
Another setback for bilingual education occurred in 1919 at the Americanization Conference. During this time, American society found it important to encourage assimilation of immigrants. Therefore, like with the Native Americans in the previous century, new immigrants had to learn English without continued development of the first language.
A shift back occurred in the early 1960s with the emphasis on the need to help children leaving below the poverty line. In 1968, the Bilingual Education Act was passed as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This act provided support to incorporate children’s native language when learning English.
Today bilingual education is still a topic for debate and many types of programs use this terminology but their goals for language learning are different. For example, some programs encourage full development of both the native language and English while other programs use the first language as a bridge to learn English. Despite these differing views, it appears that society has cycled back to a view similar to that of colonial times.
A good timeline of the roots of bilingual education
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/publicschool/roots_in_history/bilingual_timeline1.html
Post a Comment