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"My Story" September 1, 1997 I am definitely not an expert on bilingual education, but as someone that graduated from Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona with a degree in Spanish Education, Secondary Schools, I have thought about this discussion often over the years. I have to relate to you [the experience of] one of my very best professors, who holds a Doctorate in Spanish Literature and whose native country is Uruguay. One day he came to the classroom complaining about local elementary school in Flagstaff where his 6-year-old daughter was several months into her first grade of school. The elementary school had just informed him that his daughter had a learning disability. She couldn't understand her teachers. The daughter was falling behind. My professor couldn't believe that they thought she had any problems in school; after all, he was a full fledged university professor with a PhD. What had happened in this professor's home for six years prior to his daughter's entry into the school system was that he and his wife spoke only in Spanish and also in Portuguese, as his wife was from Brazil. The daughter's only exposure to English had been mainly from occasional baby sitters and the television. Conclusion on my part: children in the United States that hear mainly foreign languages in their own homes need their own parents to be more actively and intensely involved in exposing them to English. Many people have pointed out to me that the Vietnamese that have migrated into the United States have a much higher success with their children learning English fast and assimilating into the English schools at much higher levels faster. Why is this? I have no idea, but maybe Spanish speaking parents can find out and utilize some of the same methods to help their children learn English faster. I am convinced though that it will need to begin and end with better understanding of the problem in the home more so than at the school level. By the way, my professor that failed even with his own child, also ran a highly successful Spanish immersion program for college students that allowed many of its students to exit the intense immersion program that lasted only one college semester of 8 am to 5 pm, Monday-Friday study, with a very good ability to speak, read and write Spanish. One very interesting statistic that my professor kept track of was that students 23 years old or younger made the most progress and most students over the age of 25 were very limited in their abilities, especially to speak Spanish and to understand the spoken language. I worked as a student aid in his immersion program for 2 semesters and would agree with the conclusions my professor drew with ages. The lesson here, I think, is that our elementary school system ought to take a lesson and try teaching monolingual Spanish speaking pupils in a totally immersion type program that targets learning English only. Then let them loose into the public school system. The conversion might need to be quick, an immersion if you will, with a lot of help in the home. Again, I am not an expert, and my opinions are not based on much but what the heck, from what I'm reading here, the current methods are almost complete failures. A child's life should not be experimented with so tragically when the results have been so dismal. I would say scrap Bilingual Ed as it sits and reinvent the wheel. Granted, a whole lot of egos in the current system are what seem to be standing in the way. Unfortunately a whole lot of children's lives are going down the tubes as a result of the current bilingual education's shortcomings. Let's get it on!!! Tom Green
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