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International Methods for Language Instruction
Supporters of bilingual education attack the method
of Sheltered English Immersion as experimental and untested. Exactly the
opposite is the case. Short-term immersion programs along the general lines
of the "English for the Children" initiative are almost universal
throughout the world for young children not fluent in the national language.
By contrast, our system of native-language-based so-called bilingual education
is almost non-existent outside the United States.
These international comparisons are exhaustively discussed in the recent
book Educating Immigrant Children by Charles L. Glenn (Garland, 1996,
741pp), which focuses on the educational policies of a dozen European and
other countries containing large immigrant populations, including Canada,
Australia, France, Germany, and Britain. Important conclusions reached by
Glenn include:
- The overwhelming majority of the educational
systems used in these countries are either short-term (usually one year)
language immersion programs or sink-or-swim submersion.
- Use of home-language is generally restricted
to a small fraction of the school day or is made available in after-school
programs as cultural enrichment.
- Intensive native-language programs like American
bilingual education are almost non-existent. Worldwide, the largest single
instance of native-language instruction has been the establishment of some
Turkish-language government school programs in the Bavarian region of southern
Germany. These programs are regularly denounced by the German Left as racist,
xenophobic attempts by the right-wing Bavarian government to maintain educational
segregation of ethnic-Turkish children, and there seems to be considerable
truth in this.
Within the U.S., intensive immersion programs are
the preferred method whereby children from English-speaking upper-middle-class
families are taught foreign languages at a young age (the so-called "double
immersion" programs). Immersion has been the method successfully used
for more than a decade by initiative co-proponent Gloria Matta Tuchman and
the other teachers of her elementary school. |
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