Especially in societies like the United States, where multilingualism and ethnic diversity are not particularly valued, language-minority children encounter powerful forces for language shift or assimilation when they enter the majority-speaking world of the classroom. Young children are extremely vulnerable to the social pressures exerted by people in their social worlds. But the social pressure they experience is not entirely external. Internal pressure also plays a part. Once they turn on the television and hear a new language, they understand that their own language is different, and possibly they also differ in appearance and in behavior; and they come to regard these differences as undesirable. At the same time, they are motivated to stop using their L1, all too often long before they have mastered the second language, all due to the internal and external pressures from their environment.