A Language is Never a Liability
Carolyn Alessio
With a resounding "Told you so," proponents of English immersion have declared victory in the contest over how to educate the nation's immigrant children. Their winning hand contains recent test results from California, where Spanish-speaking students have shown marked improvement since the state banned bilingual education. But the English-only crowd is missing the point, and so are their debating partners from the traditional bilingual education industry. Those two approaches are not the only choices. English-only immersion programs assume that a different first language, usually Spanish, is an obstacle to education, to be surmounted as quickly as possible. Many bilingual education programs, meanwhile, treat the foreign language as a security blanket that the kids are allowed to keep until they outgrow it. In a world that increasingly demands global versatility, however, language--any language--should be viewed as an asset to be groomed and nurtured. Better yet, it should a required part of a child's education. That is where an often-overlooked approach known as dual language comes in. Dual-language education proposes that every child, regardless of his or her first language, should leave school fluent in English and a second language, most commonly Spanish. Not just passingly familiar, in the traditional high school way, but fluent enough to think and speak and write and learn in two languages. Students receive ongoing training in both languages, as well as practicing both in their other subjects. Dual language, which has its roots in Canada's French-English immersion programs, suggests an alternative to allowing politics to rule the classroom. "Bilingual education is a remedial program that views children as having something wrong with them. Dual language looks at children as potentially gifted," said Judith Kwiat-Yturriago, principal of Washington Elementary School in Evanston, which just instituted a dual-language program. The idea of dual-language education got a boost in March, when Education Secretary Richard Riley called for public school districts across the nation to create 1,000 new dual-language schools in the next five years. Other support is coming from schools already immersing students in two languages, as in Marcelo Yunda's classroom at St. Procopius Catholic Elementary School in Pilsen. There, posters in English and Spanish decorate the walls. Yunda leads discussions about science in Spanish, yet it's clear that pupils also follow the ideas in English. On a recent Friday afternoon, Yunda paused in a talk about biology to ask his 5th graders whether they knew the English for a word he had been using a lot that day. The pupils yelled out the correct answer in chorus: "seeds." Their lack of hesitation demonstrated their ability to consider sophisticated concepts in more than one way, and more than one language, without losing a step. Yet the million or more Spanish-speaking students in California may never have the chance to experience a classroom like Yunda's, at least not in the public schools. California, which voted two years ago to end bilingual education with the "English-only" Proposition 227, recently released its students' standardized test scores. After two years in English-immersion programs, the students in public school had raised their scores, sometimes dramatically. Some take the California scores as a triumph over bilingual education, but other experts advise caution. Bilingual practitioners point out that students in the initial stages of English as a Second Language, which quickly weans students off their native language, often outperform the bilingual students in the short term, but those scores tend to level out over time. "What will really be telling will be a child's educational career of 12 years," said Kwiat-Yturriago. More persuasive--and conducted over a longer period of time--is a 1995 comparative study of bilingual education by Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier of George Mason University. In a 14-year examination of more than 40,000 language-minority students, the researchers found that students of dual-language programs achieved better test scores than students in other bilingual programs. Remarkably, students in dual-language education even outperformed native speakers of English who had grown up in English-only programs. The dual-language program expected more of its students, and the students rose to the level of expectations. Dual-language education offers advantages for everyone: Anglo students, Spanish speakers and non-Spanish-speaking Latinos. "Not all Latino kids are Spanish-speaking," said Karen Beeman, principal of St. Procopius. "Parents are coming in saying, 'I feel we've lost our language.'" Not only do dual-language programs strive to protect students' sense of cultural identity, they prepare them for an increasingly global society and workplace. Last week, for instance, a third Spanish-language network was added to the U.S. television market. Even non-international companies prefer employees who also speak Spanish. It is clear that giving English-speaking students that facility will open doors for them; equally important, a failure to encourage Spanish-speaking students to continue their growth in their first language erases a natural advantage. Dual-language programs recognize that students who come to school speaking Spanish aren't always academically competent in the language. If the students do not continue to receive instruction in their native language, their skills will remain immature. St. Procopius, one of more than 20 dual-language schools in Illinois, private and public, strives to make students academically proficient in both languages at an early age. From 3rd grade on, half the school day's instruction is in Spanish and the other half in English. Certain subjects, such as science, are taught primarily in one language. Inter-American Magnet School in Chicago, which also is dual-language, conducts 80 percent of the day's instruction in Spanish and 20 percent in English. At Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Pilsen, dual-language instruction means students are expected to handle difficult tasks in both Spanish and English. Juniors, for example, learn about the history of the Americas in Spanish. Seniors study physics and Shakespeare in English. Freshmen take a guided inquiry course conducted half in Spanish and half in English. In all classes, students are expected to complete substantial projects, regardless of the language. Such linguistic dexterity comes in handy when approaching other foreign vocabularies, such as the periodic table of elements or the Middle English text of "Beowulf." "Our point is to develop higher-level thinking skills in both languages," said Cristo Rey Principal Sister Judith Murphy. In the past four years, her students' standardized test scores have risen as they progressed through the system, according to Murphy. Last year's graduating class had a 100 percent college-acceptance rate. Jessica Maldonado, a freshman at Cristo Rey who graduated from St. Procopius, said going to dual-language schools has made her more versatile. While learning in Spanish makes her "feel at home," she said, there also is constant emphasis on her second language. "It's not as if we forget about English," she said. Dual-language programs also make diversity more than just an empty political fashion. "It's an authentic multicultural experience, rather than the fake one people go through when they're subjected to a training course or learn about the holidays or foods of other cultures," said John Hilliard, educational consultant of the Illinois Resource Center in Des Plaines. While educators and politicians are evaluating bilingual education, some experts suggest the U.S. might also take a closer look at its foreign language curricula for English speakers. "Traditional foreign language programs have been a pretty miserable failure," Hilliard said. "Kids still continue to go through high school taking four years of Spanish and exit the program not being able to function communicatively in that language. ... There's a bit of hypocrisy in pointing at a bilingual program and not at a second-language program that has the same problem." Some educators and parents worry about the movement to ban bilingual education, fearing that dual language might be unfairly lumped together with the traditional programs usually referred to as bilingual education. To banish other languages from the classroom altogether contradicts the increasingly global marketplace. On a more basic level, it is alarming that language--any language--could be considered a deficit or a political powder keg. Said Kwiat-Yturriago: "The point of education is to make people better than they are."
Carolyn Alessio teaches freshman English at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School. |