Bilingual Parents Dismayed By English's Pull on Children

MIAMI, Aug. 30—In Marcel A. Apple’s bedroom, the book “The Three Little Pigs” rests on a shelf next to “Mi primer libro de palabras en Espanol” (“My First Book of Spanish Words”). The 3-year-old can sing along to both a Sesame Street song and “La Bamba,” or have as much fun watching “Barney,” a purple, English-speaking dinosaur, as he does “Tito,” a blue, Spanish-speaking shark.

But when Marcel tired of pounding on a piano one recent afternoon and sat on the lap of his Nicaraguan nanny, it was English that he spoke.

“Estan descansando?” (“Are they resting?”) Josefina Avendano asked him, pointing at a picture of a countryside in a children’s book.

“No, they’re eating,” he answered.

“I try to put him in an environment where there’s as much Spanish spoken as possible but it never seems to be enough,” said Marcel’s mother, Esther Perez-Apple, a Cuban-American who herself is trying to recapture the Spanish she heard while growing up in her native New York. “He knows he can speak in English and people could understand him.”

Last month Congress entered into a heated debate over English-only legislation, with proponents insisting that the very survival of American culture and civilization, as well as the language, was at stake. On a more down-to-earth level, the English-only drive has also been fueled by resentment against bilingual rules and other accommodation of immigrants, both old and young, who have not learned English.

But what new immigrant families across the nation are learning, as their predecessors did before them, is that the power of American culture, and particularly, the lure of television, is so strong that it is a challenge to raise a child who can speak a foreign language fluently.

Parents send their children to foreign countries for summer vacations, hire bilingual nannies and read bedtime stories in a cacophony of tongues, all in an effort to pass on the family’s language, give the children a linguistic advantage for the future or simply enrich them culturally. Still, the languages, parents say, often lose out to television, schools and peer pressure.

Even in Miami, one of the country’s most Hispanic areas, parents say it is hard to get their children to learn Spanish. The challenge to raise a child to be bilingual can be even greater for families speaking less-prevalent languages like German, Swedish or Japanese, parents say.

This experience runs counter to concerns that English is in danger of being diluted. And some bilingual educators argue that anti-immigration sentiments and the English-only laws, which generally require government business to be conducted in English, only help foster a climate that plays down the importance of other languages. They say that for a child to become bilingual it is essential that he places value on speaking more than English.

“You can have a bilingual child a lot of different ways,” said Barbara Z. Pearson, a linguist who is part of a University of Miami research team on bilingualism. “But what you have to make sure is that the kid hears both languages, values both languages and wants to speak to the people who speak those languages.”

But Mauro E. Mujica, chairman of U.S. English, a group in Washington that lobbies for English-only laws, says the language restrictions, which have been enacted in 23 states and are under consideration in Congress, are not meant to discourage other languages or dictate what people choose to speak or learn. A native of Chile who came to this country in 1964 and married an American, Mr. Mujica said he reared his three children speaking English and Spanish.

“We are in no way forcing people to speak anything; they can speak whatever they want,” Mr. Mujica said. “But when dealing with the government, they need to speak English.”

In Miami, however, a center of Latin American commerce that is heavily dependent on tourism, the problem is not getting people to learn English but getting them to retain their Spanish. Sandra H. Fradd, a University of Miami professor who conducted a study for the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce released this year, concluded that businesses worried that a shortage of bilingual workers would hamper the city’s economic growth. Many employers, she said, said they relied on foreign citizens or first-generation immigrants for jobs that require Spanish because they have found that many Hispanics are not fluent enough to conduct business.

Often, when efforts to raise a child to be bilingual fall short, he ends up with what is known as “kitchen Spanish,” the kind that is good enough only to order at a restaurant or talk to grandparents. Dade County Public Schools officials say only about 2 percent of high school students graduate fully fluent in Spanish — which means able to read, write and converse in it — in a school system where half the students are of Hispanic descent.

“We have enough Spanish courses offered that students can graduate with the fluency of Cervantes,” said Lourdes Rovira, director of foreign-language skills for Dade County schools. But, she added, “the youngsters are not taking them.”

Census figures show Miami to be the nation’s most bilingual area, with 57 percent of the residents speaking a language other than English at home, the overwhelming majority of them Spanish. But linguists here say that is largely because of the constant influx of immigrants, not necessarily the language skills of the natives.

In the Apple-Perez home in the Coconut Grove section of Miami, Marcel hears Spanish from Ms. Avendano, his mother and tapes, videos and books. He hears English from both his parents (his father, Larry, speaks English only), his paternal grandparents and television, as well as at his preschool.

On any given day, it all adds up to about one-third Spanish, not enough for him to say “zanahoria” when he sees the picture of a carrot but plenty to carry on a 15-minute conversation with a Costa Rican during a recent vacation in which he was asked questions in Spanish and he answered them in English.

“He understands everything,” Ms. Avendano noted.

But Lourdes Alvarez, whose 11-year-old daughter Cristina spoke only Spanish before Kindergarten, saw English quickly take over after the girl started school. Mrs. Alvarez says she now has to force Cristina to speak Spanish at home.

“She fights it,” Mrs. Alvarez says.

Cristina, who insists she wants to be bilingual, says English just comes more easily to her. Despite taking Spanish as a subject in school, she cannot write it and barely reads it.

“Spanish is really hard,” she says.

University of Miami linguists and psychologists who study the development of languages in elementary-school children have found that students are more proficient in English than in Spanish as early as second grade, even at schools that emphasize both languages. But they say that can only be expected when English is society’s primary language and that the children would still be considered bilingual if they can speak and write in both languages.

In Miami, where Spanish is ubiquitous, spoken on the streets and in corporate offices and heard on numerous radio and television channels, many children fail to learn the language well because parents assume it will happen automatically. But parents who have successfully promoted Spanish skills in their children say that to become literate in the language the child needs not only to hear it but to study it.

Many immigrant families see English as so fundamental to a better life that they allow their children to even shun their first language, researchers who have studied the subject say. Bilingual educators say English usually becomes the first and sometimes only language by the first American-born generation.

Census figures show that of the country’s 230 million residents 5 years old and older in 1990, 198 million spoke English only at home. Among the remaining 32 million, a majority, 17 million, said they spoke Spanish at home. Nearly 13 million of those said they also spoke English “well” or “very well.”

“Many teen-agers say they never spoke Spanish and their parents can’t speak English,” said Professor Fradd, who conducted the study for the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce. “Something happened there — trying to pass, to assimilate, not being seen as different.”

English, indeed, is so powerful it has become in effect the international language in most fields. But the need to compete for jobs in an increasingly global economy is one of the reasons for a resurgence of language study at universities and two-year colleges nationwide in the 1990’s, says the Modern Language Association, an organization of college language teachers.

In some schools, like Miami’s Florida International University, the Spanish classes are filled with students who were native speakers before English took over. But even families, like that of Barry Brown, a credit union accounting clerk with no language other than English in his background, have chosen to make language skills a priority in their children’s education. Mr. Brown’s 8-year-old daughter, Megan, who attends a school here whose goal is to turn out bilingual graduates in English and Spanish, now can translate at the market and with neighbors for her mother, Mary, a presser at a dry cleaner who gets teased by her daughter for knowing only two Spanish words: “si” and “no.”.

“Any type of education is a real asset,” Mr. Brown said. “You feel your kids will have a better shot at the jobs that are opening.”

The Congressional bill to formally make English the official language of the United States, which awaits a vote in the Senate, is the latest effort by English-only proponents to curtail bilingual government documents, ballots and other programs. This fall the Supreme Court will weigh in by reviewing Arizona’s law.

Supporters of the laws say they promote unity, cut government costs and encourage new immigrants to learn English. But often they portray other languages as a threat to nationalism and point north at the conflict between French-speaking Quebec and the rest of Canada, which is predominantly English-speaking.

Canada scholars question the Quebec analogy, noting there is no region in the United States where a language other than English predominates and where a local majority wants to preserve that. And detractors of the laws, including President Clinton, who has promised to veto the bill if it is passed, say the laws only harm the minority of elderly and newly arrived immigrants who cannot communicate in English.

Florida is among the states where voters approved a constitutional amendment to declare English the official language. But legislation needed to enforce the eight-year-old law has never been passed.

Parents who want their children to speak other languages say the laws are unnecessary.

“There’s no question that the nation’s language is English, but we have to broaden ourselves,” said Ligia Esteva, a Miami area resident who sends her 9-year-old son, Eric, to a school where instruction is given in Spanish and English. “You go to Israel and the cabdriver speaks seven languages. I’d like my son to take French.”



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