The Bilingual Debate: Transitional Classrooms

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Despite his own family history — or perhaps inspired by it — Barack Obama is pitching a middle ground when it comes to bilingual education. He rejects the English-only thrust of nativist conservatives, while distancing himself from advocates of cultural preservation.

Mr. Obama favors “transitional bilingual education,” meaning that he believes teachers should transition children to English as quickly as possible, building-up from students’ knowledge of their native language. That is, youngsters should become literate in two languages, not one.

Research inside schools lends support to his approach, assuming that a new generation of teachers can be prepared to serve the nation’s growing number of Asian and Hispanic children who enter school not speaking English. The nation’s economic future depends especially on the human capital of young Hispanics. By 2025, one in four students nationwide will be of Hispanic heritage.

The Bush administration has made little progress in closing huge gaps in achievement levels of Hispanic versus (non-Hispanic) white children. This means a less productive labor force in coming decades, the very workers that must help cover our Social Security checks and health care costs.

For Hispanic parents, the No. 1 issue in the presidential race is education. They will tilt swing states, like Colorado, Florida, New Mexico and Virginia, toward the Democratic or Republican column. One-third of Hispanics registered as independents, often small business owners who depend on young literate employees, favor John McCain.

My Education Watch correspondent, Lance Izumi, prefers English immersion. But millions of young children enter school without grasping much English, and No Child Left Behind now humiliates them by setting on their desk a standardized exam that can’t be deciphered. These naïve policies only stigmatize what young children know, undercut their confidence in the classroom, and disempower parents.

Transitional classrooms, as Mr. Obama puts forward, offer a pragmatic alternative. A generation of research details that it’s the richness of teacher’s verbalizations that sparks the child’s growth in oral language, and then reading proficiency. An overnight shift to English can shake the child’s underlying confidence to communicate and stifle literacy growth in either language.

Even a Bush administration review of controlled classroom experiments — seeking to identify what works in language teaching — found stronger achievement gains for students enrolled in quality bilingual programs, compared with English-immersion classrooms. Yet a skilled bilingual teacher is crucial, one who understands the knowledge and social norms that children acquire at home, and how to build from the first language to advance rich oral language and then written literacy. It’s a no-brainer for students attending schools in Europe and East Asia.

Mr. Obama’s “Latino Blueprint for Change” promises to “close the achievement gap by investing in proven interventions.” Indeed the evidence points to other beneficial programs for Hispanic children, like expanding quality preschools and recruiting a new generation of bilingual teachers.

Mr. Obama’s promised “army of new teachers” could spur demand for Hispanic college graduates — if more than half actually graduated from dreary urban high schools. Many teenagers must exit to backstop their family’s economic survival.

Meanwhile, Mr. McCain has little to say to Hispanic parents and all Americans who are eager to nurture a more productive workforce. He barely mentioned education reform in a recent speech before the League of United Latin American Citizens, saying only that “we need to shake-up failed school bureaucracies with competition.” The notion of individuals competing for scarce places in private schools remains foreign to most Hispanic communities, held together by pro-family values and economic cooperation.

Money matters will likely dominate the candidates’ remaining stump speeches during the final weeks of this marathon campaign. Barack Obama has much to gain by accenting his plan for lifting Hispanic achievement. Amplifying this message might spark robust voter turnout by a pivotal constituency. If elected, his press for a more integrated and literate workforce will benefit us all.

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Excellent column. I can only speak from the perspective of an employer in NYC and a non-English speaking immigrant to this country.

I’ve had several Latinos work for me over the yrs, who’ve gone through so-called “bi lingual” programs. Those are basically classes conducted 90% in SPANISH and since the kids are Latino, they speak Spanish to each other before during and after school. As a result, despite spending 25 hours/week in CLASS, not to mention homework, these young people’s Eng. proficiency is terrible ! The teachers and administrators involved are doing a cruel disservice to these students who cannot operate outside of the Latino ghetto: can’t get jobs, file papers etc.
By contrast, when I arrived here in 64, there was no such thing as “bilingualism” in schools. My siblings and I and countless others were thrown in to sink or swim in public schools. Guess what ? We all swam ! We were surrounded by Eng-speaking students, teachers, etc. TV, radio completed the Eng. immersion. And the Times cost us students a nickel! [one of the greatest ideas ever!]

Most of us in our immmigrant community adapted; many thrived. There was no “press 2 for Spanish” on phone messages either–all of this coddling is acting as a giant “Enabler” that perpetuates the difficulties of integration of Latinos and others in a society that is not going to become Latina any time soon !

In my experience, a competent ESL teacher beats a competent Bilingual teacher any day. You need exceptional Bilingual teachers to get the kind of results you report. Ideally, they teach in English, but support in Spanish. I’ve worked with some exceptional Bilingual teachers, and that’s what they do. Unfortunately, most Bilingual teachers I’ve met do the opposite, since their English skills are way below average. Outside the classroom, they do the same things the students do: congregate in groups speaking only Spanish all day. That doesn’t happen as much in schools with an English immersion philosophy. Furthermore, some schools here in Queens have students from 30-40 different countries. Bilingual education is impossible when there may be only 5-10 students speaking a particular language. These students have a very high success rate. Are you suggesting that a Spanish-speaking student can’t perform as well as a Farsi-speaking student in an ESL environment?

1. In the days of unrestricted immigration before 1921, young children speaking many languages were crammed into a single classroom with a teacher who only spoke English. They all learned English.

2. In Texas, where Hispanics were often put into a classroom with only Hispanic students and a teacher who only spoke English, the student experience was more varied, with many students continuing to ignore the teacher and converse in Spanish with their classmates, and managing to remain illiterate in both languages. Other students did become bilingually literate, but this was often through no fault of the teacher.

3. For more than 50 years, some researchers have ‘proved’ that total-immersion is the best approach to language learning. Educators were seldom able to sell total-immersion classes in other languages to satisfy the foreign language requirement for native-English speaking students. The main value of the ‘research’ was to console educators in ESL classes for mixtures of immigrants speaking a wide variety of different languages, where the teacher had no choice other than total-immersion.

4. I spent many years in required foreign-language classes in three different languages. The classes were all conducted in English, and I managed to pass all these classes without actually learning any language other than English. In retrospect, I had and have no opportunity to use any of the languages I studied, and it is not clear if the lessons would have been of any lasting value had I been in a situation where I could have used the languages, but I suspect they would have been, and I also suspect, had the classes been total-immersion, most students, myself included, would have conversed in English and ignored the teacher.

5. I met a young lady who had been put, with other native-English speakers, into a ‘total immersion’ Chinese class in Taiwan, and who only learned that the Chinese for ‘Hello,’ is ‘knee how.’ (At the time, Taiwan did not use pinyin.) My impression is that a class given by a bilingual educator using pinyin would have been much more effective. At least she would have learned that ‘Hello’ is written ‘ni3 hao3′ in Latin transliteration.

Not only “nativist conservatives” advocate total immersion for learning another language. Many English as a Second Language teachers do too. Why are English language programs in East Asia better than those in East LA?

I have to take exception to this position. My grandparents came to this country (c1910) speaking no English. They learned. Their children never spoke English until they went to school. The lessons were presented in English only. They learned. My mother-in-law grew up in a household were they spoke only Italian. She learned English only when she went to school. Moreover, the cultural traditions of the countries from which these people emigrated were not lost. What did occur was a rapid assimilation into the cultural traditions of the United States that forged their identity as Americans rather than as hyphenated Americans. I welcome all legal immigrants to this country. But if you want to live here, you need to commit to assimilating the language and culture of this country even as you cherish that of your country of origin.

Post 1 was absolutely correct. Kids are language sponges. Have them sink or swim by putting them in an English only classroom and they will swim. And for those who have trouble, provide them with extra help outside the classroom. Cheaper than bilingual classrooms and more effective.

Running a school system based on avoiding “humiliation”, “stigmatization”, “undercutting confidence,” and “disempowerment” is exactly what has brought our educational system to it’s present low standards. Children need to be challenged. They thrive on challenge. Teaching a child in an unfamiliar language for 5 hours a day will challenge them, and they will rise to the challenge. And they won’t “lose” their first language because that will still be spoken in the home.

Bilingual classrooms are a ghetto, plain and simple. And they have not worked. If they had, those “press 2 for Spanish” messages (mentioned also in post 1) we get all the time would not be needed.

For that matter, why is it that Spanish speakers are the only ones who seem to have trouble with English? I think it can be directly linked to the size of the Spanish speaking immigrant community and its success in lobbying successfully for bilingual education for their children.

Unfortunately, bilingualism is a failed policy, brought on by the feel good educational values of the 60’s and not suited for the challenges of the 21st century. It hasn’t worked (outside a few exceptional cases) for 40 years. We need to abandon bilingualism’s failed promises.

There are at least 14 languages spoken by the students in the elementary school my children attend. There is Farsi, Croatian, Vietnamese, Chinese etc… all in addition to Spanish. Two students from Vietnam just arrived last week in this country and are now enrolled at our school. I think it is simply not possible, from a budget and logistics perspective, to accomodate the great and wonderful diversity of the English learners of the modern classroom. No school will ever have the resources to provide teachers with expertise in all of these languages. Immersion is really the only way.

Are you listening. These are your earmarks, your money going down the drain. The people are telling you. People who have experienced it, seen it and lived it. Bi – Lingual leaves most behind. As we tighten our belts, step on the pay off track and fight on ask this question. How many home owners signed the line not knowing the consequence? Read Read Read, practical math. Banking, percentages contacts. Teach one complete language.

When I was teaching preschool a few years ago, I had a three-year-old in my class who, despite having been born in the US, spoke only Russian. (Before anyone flips out, she came to day care while her mother was enrolled in ESL classes.) This poor child was absolutely terrified, the entire time she was with us, for weeks–and can you blame her? Imagine being three and thrust into an environment where people are constantly talking gibberish at you, and no one understands when you ask for something you need!

Over the course of an academic year, I did manage to get this little girl to the point where she was comfortable enough to play, to use non-verbal cues, and eventually to speak a few words of English to me and to the other children. But it took a really, really long time, and she was miserable for most of it. And anyone who’s studied Maslow knows that children (and adults) can’t learn a language or anything else while they’re that upset.

My point: Total immersion might help at least some kids acquire a second language. But it’s a big mistake to ignore the damaging effects it can have on them.

I agree with posters #1 & 2. Bilingual teaching just doesn’t work if the objective is to transition students into all-English classes; the bilingual instructor who does too good a job of getting her students to switch to English is likely to be out of a job! There is a strong incentive to keep kids in “bilingual” (actually Spanish) classes long after they should be proficient in English.

Why are we giving Hispanic immigrants so much more leeway in learning English than we expect of most other nationalities? I haven’t yet heard “Press 2 for German” when I call a customer service line. If people want to come here, they should come legally and learn English (preferably before they come). They should be willing to assimilate into our society, or they should stay home. We don’t need any Balkanization of our society into competing ethnic or linguistic blocs.

“Quality” bilingual teachers says it all. Bilingual education works great in university-administered pilot programs; in the real world, it’s a flop. The greatest gift we could give Hispanic children is the abolition of an educational strategy that, whatever its potential, too often prevents children from mastering the skill that is more important than any other to their future success, proficiency in English.

Instead of just arguing the merits of his position Professor immediatley hurls an epithet at me, I’m a “nativist conservative”. I shut down after the first sentence. People who argue this way aren’t worth my time and effort.

I would like to know why children born in this country enter school not being able to speak English. I would further like to know how someone born in this country can attain voting age without a command of the English language such that our candidates need to conduct campaigns in Spanish, often with quite different content than their English-language campaign material or require the services of a translator for assistance at the polls. I would further like to know how a naturalized citizen, whose proficiency in English is a requirement for citizenship, can be so lacking in his command of English that he also requires political and voting assistance in Spanish.

Answers, anyone?

I think it speaks volumes that apparently the strategies that work well are not being applied to certain groups for the sake of political expediency. My ancestors(french/german) all learned English because they had to, and their parents weren’t opposed to it because it represented opportunity and upward mobility. The notion that Hispanic lingual integration should be treated differently that any other language historically or currently is shameful.

My fiancée is a good example of how English immersion works. Her parents are of Chinese origin and they came to US from Vietnam as a result of the war which additionally disrupted their native education before they completed high school. The result is that she showed up to school knowing almost no English at her elementary school in the deep south. However, the immersion worked because young children’s brains are designed to learn language easily. Today her English skills are a good bit better than the average Native born speaker, and it didn’t require the teacher who started her off to know a single stitch of Cantonese.

I would recommend, elephant4life, that you visit a Hispanic community somewhere (though I doubt – and sincerely hope – that you live very near to one.) Immigrant children today are no different from those of past decades in their DESIRE to learn English – in fact, with English media so dominant, I would argue that in many ways they are even more thirsty to acquire their new language. The problem is, the barriers that they face are enormous, and many of these were not around in previous eras of high immigration.
I teach 20 brilliant 3rd graders who are bilingual or on their way to becoming so. They live in a community that is almost entirely immigrant and non-native-English speaking. Go to the post office, McDonald’s, the park, church, the bank, and you can speak Spanish (or English, but the point is you CAN speak Spanish). There is little opportunity to be forced to practice English, though it would greatly benefit them. When these occasions do arise, my students become translators for their families, often in situations that most of us were not even present for when we were their age (arguments with renters associations, grandmothers’ doctors appointments, siblings’ parent-teacher conferences, you name it). Trust me, they desperately want to be fluent in English. But they will not get there any more quickly if you – English-speaking citizens – continue to list examples of immersion “working” in 1:20 ratio settings (when there is one language learner and 20 native speakers) and fail to see the danger of assuming it can work equally well in 20:1 settings (which I experience every day).
So please, stop asserting your sweeping claims about immersion and come volunteer in a classroom like mine where just by nature of your being born to English-speaking parents you will be an invaluable asset to our instruction. Or, if you can’t come in, send us a check.

Mr Izumi focuses on Sixth Street Prep in Victorville, Ca. as a success story for full immersion. But what he does not point out is thatSixth Street Prep has an enrollment that includes 80% Hispanic (according to the latest School Accountability Report Card). Perhaps the Spanish-speaking English Learners do not get help in their primary language in class, but they may very well be getting help in their primary language “under the table” from their classmates with better English proficiency.

I looked for the comparison between Sixth Street Prep and “similar schools” but did not find it on the SARC.

elephant4life asks why children born in this country enter school not speaking English. The answer is that some of their parents don’t speak English. Others speak English but not well enough to qualify as “fluent,” so they are grouped with English Learners.

Learning a language is not easy. If you are trying to learn content (math, science, history, literature) while also learning the language in which it is taught, it is that much more difficult. elephant4life, how did YOU learn English? Do you even know?

Perhaps elephant4life could try living in a country where another language is spoken – try functioning in that country’s economy and political system. That experience will provide the answers s/he is looking for.

The joke is that a person who speaks three languages is trilingual; two languages, bilingual; one language? An American.

We should have higher expectations of our schools in an interdependent world. In Europe, students graduate from High School knowing their own language, the lingua franca of Europe (now English), and many times a third language. We try to limit the potential of our diversity at our own peril: we need everybody to be at LEAST bilingual.

I went through a dual immersion (English/Spanish)program as a child. I am Latino. I am now fluent and literate in both languages, and when I had the opportunity to travel to Italy and Brazil in college I learned those languages relatively easy because learning languages became second nature. When I read opinions that promote English-only, I wonder why people can’t see that our brains have tremendous potential to learn more than just one language proficiently. Asking for our school system to teach only one language is part of the constant “dumbing down” of America.

Though an Anglo, I lived in Mexico until the age of six. Immersion worked fine for me — I remember as a five-year-old not knowing certain words, but I was always able to find work-arounds until I learned the proper Spanish.

Later in life, I lived, worked and studied in Brazil and Italy and learned Portuguese and Italian in an immersion environment.

I vividly recall the process of learning, and how quickly it took to be comfortable in other languages.

After 30 years in the private work force, I became an elementary bilingual teacher in Texas. In my first year, I was shocked to find that most kids in my class had been in American schools for four or five years and were totally inept in English. Worse, their Spanish-language skills were terrible as well. They could hardly read or write in either language.

My solution was to give them intensive English and literature. As a class, we read Mark Twain, Roald Dahl, and Shakespeare. They memorized a poem a week. The kids loved it and they learned.

If a kid can learn misogynistic rap lyrics in a moment, they can just as quickly — and more profitably — fill their minds with Shel Silverstein, Robert Frost and Emily Dickenson.

They write constantly, and focus on spelling and phonics.

The payoff? At the end of the year, when I transitioned nearly all to English-only classes, the kids literally jumped up and down with joy. Their parents had tears in their eyes at the school awards ceremony when our kids were given recognition as the best readers in school by far.

The kids and parents know that with English-language skills they have a future limited only by their dreams. They can aspire to more than menial jobs and $1,000 a month paychecks.

For my kids, multiculturalism IS English.

As a bilingual Hispanic, I can speak from my own experience that in a bilingual environment a student may learn both languages, but it is only in an inmersion setting that he/she will actually become adept at the secondary language.

Part of the reason we have immigrants whe have been here for decades and are still not functional English-speakers is that our society provides them with means to exist in our community without making any type of societal commitment to their new chosen land. On top of that we have foreign consulates intent on preserving their former residents in ignorance and fealty to their country.

Having lived in Mexico, I can attest to you that no other country in the world provides so many tools for the foreigner to avoid becoming acclimated and socially naturalized. On the one hand we want these people to become Americans and on the other hand we give them means to remain the impoverished, ignorant low skill laborers they were in the country they abandoned.

We should makethings so that the immigrant has no choice but to learn English or leave for a country more in tune to his commitment to adapt. You’d be surprised at what the human being can do when faced with no other options.

It’s incredible how far behind we are in language when compared to Europe. I say we should definitely teach two languages to students while they are young. I am living in Spain as a college student and this experience has enriched my life. I find it extremely rewarding to be able to understand a different language. Way to go, Obama!

Bilingual programs may be primarily focused on children of immigrants, but other children benefit from these programs as well. Children need to learn English to be competitive in the United States; to be competitive in a global community, however, it is almost certain that children today will need to know more than one language tomorrow. Waiting until high school to learn a second language puts people in the United States at a serious disadvantage.

It is also worthwhile to note that it is in school that we learn to read, write and often speak correctly. Having your family speak a different language than the language you learn in school only prepares you to be bilingual, but it does not give you the critical skills to be fluent in reading, writing and speaking in multiple languages. Please consider that all children will benefit from learning more than one language in a school setting from a young age.

My family is bilingual since my husband is German and, for a time, we lived in Germany. So, as the saying goes, when in Rome do as the Romans. We began with our son going into 3rd grade with the challenges of learning German and all the other subjects that 3rd graders have to learn. To add to his confusion, after learning the english method of doing math he now had to forget about that and learn the German method. However, in a relatively short time we were both able to read, write and speak German. Going to school is the best method of learning another language as your mistakes are corrected immediately.

Spanish speaking people need to learn english if they wish to live in the US.

English speaking people should learn spanish if they need to because of their job or because they like travelling to spanish speaking countries. They should not have to learn spanish because spanish speaking people are not willing to learn english.

Learning English is vital; it is also important for our students to learn a language other than English and for those who learned another language at home to acquire a mastery of that language as well as English. These are all obvious assets to someone who lives in a United States that is increasingly part of a global economy. We fall short in all of these areas. We fall short in the last one–the acquisition of English as well as the mastery of another mother tongue by immigrant students–because transitional bilingual education is poorly implemented and widely misunderstood. As a result we neglect this and other areas of educational policy.

Transitional bilingual education is a tough sell, for at least three reasons. First, most people who have arrived as non-English speakers and learned English in what is referred to as “English immersion,” or whose relatives or ancestors learned English that way, extrapolate from their personal experience. I learned it fine, they argue; why isn’t this good enough for today’s (mostly Spanish-speaking) immigrants? This criticism makes the fatal but generally unacknowledged assumption that everyone learns in the same way and that everyone has the same relationship with the school and with teachers as everyone else.
Second, many bilingual programs have been implemented poorly. Either they didn’t get well-trained, fully-bilingual teachers, or the appropriate resources or administrative support to succeed. Or, some have implemented them as cultural-maintenance programs rather than as a transitional vehicle for the acquisition of English. Hence, many find it easy to conclude that bilingual education has failed when it was not implemented in a way that it could succeed or to condemn it as a program with goals other than the acquisition of English.
Third, bilingual education has become politicized. This means that instead of a discussion of how we identify the educational technique (immersion, dual language, transitional bilingual ed, etc.) most appropriate for a particular classroom, given the resources and context, we get caught up in symbolic debates about whether immigrants want to learn English or identify with this country or not. More importantly, the controversy over bilingual education almost makes it not worth it–which may be the intention of its opponents. There is only so much energy and time that people will dedicate to education issues: there are many other areas equally or more important that are getting ignored as we impale each other over symbolic issues.

English was the third language I learned, and not the last. In my community (German-Hungarians from Yugoslavia), being multi-lingual was the norm. Switching languages in the middle of a sentence was common.

Americans, because of their island-nation isolation, are uncomfortable with other languages because native-born Americans are so rarely placed into situations where English is not the norm. I think they see other languages as being somehow aberrant. I remember one person once saying to me, “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”

In Finland, all students must learn three mandatory languages: Finnish, Swedish, and English. Many also learn a fourth. Language instruction begins in kindergarten. This is critical. American students start language instruction too late, after their brains have lost the necessary plasticity to become fully fluent and comfortable in another language.

The vast majority of immigrants learn English, in varying levels of proficiency, primarily dependent on their age of initiation into English. Monolingual Americans haven’t had the experience of learning a foreign language in adulthood to realize just how difficult it is. On the other hand, children under the age of 10 learn languages almost without effort.

Spanish is a special case. Americans forget that Spanish was spoken in America before English and that Spanish speaking areas of America were forcibly annexed into the English-dominant culture. The size and historical continuity of Hispanic culture in the U.S. has such momentum, that to ignore it or try to change its inertia is a foolish. To attempt to do so is to ignore the nature of human nature.

I went through the process of Americanization. I did not like it. I still don’t feel myself to be truly American, even though I’ve lived here over 50 years. I’m still a stranger in a strange land. But English is my primary language and the one I’m most comfortable in today. But if I watch a movie in one of my other languages, I immediately start thinking in that language instead of English.