Bilingual Education Essay and Research Paper
The term “bilingual education” commonly refers to programs where English is
taught for part of the day and academic subjects are taught in the native
language. English-as-a-second-language programs emphasize immersion, employing
the native language only to aid the general teaching in English. Bilingual
education programs have been implemented for decades. Nevertheless, Non-English
speaking students in bilingual education programs have depicted no scholastic or
social development compared to comparable students in English-only schools. The
drawbacks of bilingual education programs outnumber the benefits. In addition,
modern statistics recommend the necessity for reorganization of the current
bilingual education programs.
Bilingualism is an actuality today and it will turn a greater actuality as time
goes. The amount to which it is common is evidenced by the attendance of
bilinguals in every country at the moment, as well as in each and every social
class and every age group.
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Schools initiated tutoring academics in languages other than English as early as
the 1700’s, but not until the 1960’s did society identify the hundreds of
thousands of non-English speaking students agonizing in the current system.
Prior to that time, immigrants were admitted in non-English schools. The fight
for a bilingual education program initiated during the Civil Rights Movement.
Immigrants, chiefly Latin and Mexican Americans espied the headway that African
Americans were making and decided to contest for alike education.
The numerous objectives of the bilingual education program are to educate
student’s fundamental academic subjects in their native language consequently
augmenting their academic progress. The program was also intended to teach the
students both reading and writing skills in their native language and inevitably
to immerge them into classes taught in English. Students in bilingual education
programs learn English from the time they set foot in school. All their academic
classes, nevertheless, are taught in their native language. After three years of
English instruction, students are put into English-only classes. The aim of
these objectives is to sustain the students’ culture at school.
The issue of Bilingual education raised various disturbing conflicts, in the
field of Hispanic-black communion. Blacks and Hispanics for a time had work
together in common operations over against racial discrimination. The huge
spending of public funds, nonetheless, without a doubt led to skirmish over the
allocations among distinct ethnic communities. Equally contestable was the issue
of desegregation. Assuming that Hispanic children should be taught in the
parental home language, they would have to be disassociated from other students,
this would lead to the detachment they were criticizing at a time when public
schools were in fact becoming more isolated with the growth of Hispanic children
nationwide.
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Bilingual education might have gained extensive acceptance if its advocates had
been content to explicate bilingual education as no more than a passing bridge
to assimilation. Numerous intellectuals, though, went further. They affiliated
bilingual education with bicultural education and bicultural education with
cultural separatism, or concurring ethnicity with a far-reaching investigation
of conventional American values. By doing so, they alienated the huge mass of
traditional voters who continued to constitute the overwhelming majority of the
American electorate. Much to its drawback, bilingual education came to be
associated, for several of its academic defenders, with the postulation that the
classroom should furnish remedial treatment as well as teaching. “A much larger
issue emerges as we engage in increasingly bitter debates on the future of
educational policy in this country. An important omission in the reporting is
the lack of detail on how the questions were framed, who supported or opposed
the program, and where the support for or opposition to the program originated.
I would venture to suggest that the majority of those favoring the use of
bilingual approaches were individuals, friends, or relatives and co-workers of
families whose children were directly affected, while the majority of the
opposition came from those who held opinions on the issue but had no perceived
direct personal stake involved in the outcomes.”
Bilingual education has done well, but it can do much better. The paramount
uncertainty is the inadequacy and dearth of books in both the first and second
languages in the lives of students in these programs. Free voluntary reading can
help all constituents of bilingual education. It can be a root of understandable
input in English or a means for germinating knowledge and education through the
first language, and for persisting first language development. The reason why I
think that bi-lingual education is not appropriate for school is that a number
of problems plague the foreign-language programs in our schools. Few American
schools demand students to study foreign languages. Some offer only two years of
language, even for students in the college-preparatory track.
Several of our language teachers have only elementary command of the languages
they teach. Most harmful of all, few American schools truly anticipate their
students to master the languages they study. In too many schools, it is
sufficient for students of languages to conjugate a few verbs, memorize a few
common nouns, and draw a few pictures.
References
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/edu/seeley/consens/BILING.HTM Bilingual
Education
http://www.idra.org/Newslttr/1998/Sep/Albert2.htm
IDRA Newsletter - September 1998. In This Issue: High Standards
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