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Caligastia
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quote:
Massachusetts recently began requiring bilingual-education teachers to pass English-fluency tests to keep their jobs. Teachers who have flunked the test are taking drastic action to address their obvious educational inadequacies -- they are suing their local school districts.
In Lowell, Mass., four Cambodian-born teachers who flunked have sued on grounds of discrimination. Failing teachers in other Massachusetts cities are consulting their lawyers, too. How they are doing this is not clear. Maybe they have interpreters.
Critics of bilingual education have long contended that rather than -- as advertised -- a way to ease immigrants into instruction in English, it constitutes an educational ghetto where students are taught in their native tongues and are kept from learning in English. The fluency debacle in Massachusetts is a stark demonstration of this critique.
In Somerville, Mass., the five bilingual teachers who took the test failed. In Lowell, 22 of 25 teachers failed. In Lawrence, 27 out of 31 teachers failed. The widespread failure to pass the test is a sign that bilingual education is a misnomer. It is really monolingual education, in any language but English.
Last November, Massachusetts approved a ballot referendum ditching bilingual education for immigrant children and moving to an English-immersion program instead. The referendum was the brainchild of entrepreneur Ron Unz, who sponsored a similar, successful initiative in California in 1998.
Unz believes that teaching children in English is the best way to teach them English. For most people, this is just common sense. But it is too much to expect a state education department to respect common sense or look after the educational interests of its students, especially if it requires confronting a politically correct interest group. Bilingual education is a favorite cause of left-wing ethnic lobbies that think English-only instruction is practically cultural imperialism -- never mind that it gives immigrant kids the tools to succeed in the United States.
So, Unz went to California voters. They passed an initiative in 1998 moving from bilingual to English-immersion instruction by a 2-to-1 margin. Every year since, the performance of Latino students in English-only classes has improved and outpaced that of students in holdover bilingual classes. Unz assumed all of this would provide the momentum to vanquish bilingual ed across the country. "I thought we could have this successful experiment in California," says Unz, "and it would roll on from there."
Instead, bilingual education has remained firmly entrenched nearly everywhere. Unz next went to Massachusetts, the most liberal state this side of Pluto, to prove again that bilingual education has no popular constituency. The initiative passed by 36 points.
It was the same as California's, with the exception of slightly stronger language calling for fluency in English from former bilingual teachers. "The places where you heard the most anecdotal stories of teachers not knowing English were in Massachusetts and New York City," says Unz.
The stories have borne out. Massachusetts teachers who will be shifted from bilingual ed to English immersion have been flunking an oral examination in which they are asked to do things like describe their jobs (apparently they don't even know how to say foreign languages"). "They have got to come up to par," says Rosalie Porter, a former bilingual teacher in Massachusetts who was a leader of the anti-bilingual initiative.
She became a bilingual teacher in the 1970s, when the program first began in Massachusetts, hoping to help immigrant children. She became convinced that bilingual ed was a catastrophe. "I saw that it absolutely didn't work," she says. "If we taught the kids in Spanish it would delay their learning of English, and delay it so much that it would be hard for them to catch up."
The California experience has proven what Porter has maintained for years. "Kids," she says, "will master the language quickly, maybe in a year, maybe two." If, that is, they are taught in English. Whether their former bilingual teachers will pick up the language as quickly, on the other hand, is very much in doubt.
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http://www.townhall.com/columnists/...l20030805.shtml
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GePap
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of the Big Apple
Nov 2001
time: 23:30
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quote:
Originally posted by DinoDoc
I would hope so. Considering that you have to teach in both languages. |
Actually, in this country, no. When I first came here, I was in a bilingual class, and the amount of English instruction was next to nill, and relatively ineffective. I agree that it is an acedemic Ghetto: in my school, classes were divided by ability, so you had X-1 (X being the grade),2,3,4 and then billingual, at the very academic bottom. Kids got to move up and down these (I went from 3 to 2 to 1 in about 2 months), but for the most parts kids in billingual stayed either in billingual, or moved up to 4. My mom saw that my sister and I were not getting an english education, so she demanded that we be placed in an all english class, and that was the right decision.
Kids in bilingual education in the uS ends up as monolingual as Americans, but without knowing the language that they need most in the US.
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GePap
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of the Big Apple
Nov 2001
time: 23:30
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quote:
Originally posted by Japher
Yeah, the main problem I see here is that most of these teachers are not trying to teach kids spanish, german, chinesse, what have you at an english speaking, American school, they are trying to teach kids English so that they can go to english speaking, American schools (ESL courses)... The F'ing teachers who lie to get a job (though the schools administration should be able to notice that they can't speak English) are depriving students of a proper education not only on how to speak English, but from every other course offered at the school and in life.
I hope a judge laughs this one right out of court because I do not want to see one tax dollar go towards this rediculous suit. |
The point of these teachers Japher is NOT to teach these students english, it is to teach them other subjects in their native tounge. For that you really don;t need English, now do you? And that is why "bilingual education" is such a misnomer. And why it is a ghetto. The fact is that kids pick up language very quickly at a certain age. Put these kids in the normal classes, and within two, theree months, they will keep up, and in a year be fluent. They will most likely still speak their other language at home and thus be bilingual.
This sort of bilingual education should be done away with.
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mindseye
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A Yankee living in Shanghai
Apr 1999
time: 13:30
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Has anyone in this thread studied a technical subject like mathematics or chemisty in a language they were not proficient in?
I once dated a Vietnamese guy who earned a technical degree in computers (studying things like Assembly language), even though his English was pretty elementary. I'm curious about the experiences of others.
While I sympathize with some of the author's intentions, the piece has some serious flaws.
quote:
four Cambodian-born teachers who flunked |
What was the test like? How large is the supply of Cambodian-speaking teachers in the Lowell area? If they were teaching in Cambodian, how well did they need to speak English?
quote:
Massachusetts teachers (...) have been flunking an oral examination in which they are asked to (...) describe their jobs (apparently they don't even know how to say "foreign languages"). |
Notice that we don't know which part of the oral test they actually flunked, it's the columnist's jab that they did not know how to say "foreign languages". For all we know, they flunked because they couldn't explain what a past participle is. I wonder if the test they took was similar to the American TOEFL test, which is not a very reliable indicator of one's English-speaking abilities (it's a better indicator of one's ability to memorize long lists of obscure, seldom-used words).
I understand all the good reasons not to create an academic ghetto, but I think arguments to completely scrap bi-lingual teaching are terribly short-sighted (and usually made by mono-linguists). Wouldn't it be better to fix the proram? How about easing the kids into learning in English? Wouldn't that be a better idea all-around?
As to those who advocate abandoning the program altogether, I wonder how well their children would do studying chemistry in Cambodian? Would they really "pick up" Cambodian, or would they get frustrated and drop out?
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Albert Speer
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Puerile Polemic
Mar 1999
time: 00:30
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dated a guy, mindseye? you're gay too?!
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All times are GMT. The time now is 05:30.
Apolyton Time is 00:30. |
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06-08-2003 20:58
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