Bilingual Education. Literature & Language Education Essay

Factors Affecting the Bilingual Education Student’s Name
Course
Instructor
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Bilingual Education
For any person moving to a new country, it is a fact that this move often comes with a number of challenges. The greatest of these is the process of learning and adopting a completely new language father from the one a person knew before. The articles “Aria”, Mother Tongue” and “Immersion” provide a glimpse of the experiences of some of the immigrant families that found their way into the United States. Here, they were forced to learn English as a second language given that it was the main language used for communication purposes both in school and in general public. The texts address the struggles by the different individuals to learn their second language, which is English, and the effects of the same on their first languages as well as the effect to their social interactions. Through the texts, it is quite clear that even though people may find it hard to step away from the original language of their native countries, mastering English in an environment such as that of the U.S is necessary for helping an individual to have a sense of belonging to the society. This paper explores the different ways in which the concerned individuals initially dealt with the idea of English Only classes, the mother tongue influence on learning English, changes in their sense of assimilation into the bilingual education and finally the major effects of bilingual education for immigrant families.
In the three texts, the characters Moises, Rodriguez and Tan have different ways of dealing with and approaching bilingual education or the idea of using English Only in the United States. In the beginning in “Immersion” and “Aria” respectively, both Moises and Rodriguez have a hard time dealing with the rule about “English Only” in the class. In the case of Moises, his knowledge of English is quite limited to only a few random words that are obviously not enough to enable him understand or communicate the language well. For instance, when Ms. Peterson was giving out the instructions about the practice test, Moises could not understand a single word and instead relied on a friend Alicia to translate most of what was being said. The above is evident when he asks, “What’s she saying? Is the test starting?” (Levien 3). Apart from this, he does not understand most of the content of the practice test he was handed by the teacher. As a result, he had a difficult time answering any of the mathematics questions given even though it was quite evident that he was a sharp student. From his case, it is very evident that Moises could not deal well with the English only policy since it alienated him greatly from the rest of his classmates. As mentioned before, Rodriguez had an almost similar start whereby he found himself in a class full of whites and where he was expected to already have knowledge about the English language. Just like the case before, Rodriguez was disadvantaged since he too was only “able to understand about fifty stray English words.” (Rodriguez 25). He also points out that “he was the problem student in school” (25). From the two cases, we get an idea that for most of the students and pupils from bilingual families, dealing with English only classes is usually a big challenge that is due to language barriers. Such learners as determined above, often have a limited knowledge in the English language that makes communication a problem hence affecting the learning process. Luckily, for Amy Tan, her experience was slightly different from that of Moises and Rodriguez. As she recounts her performance in grade school, she points out that her performance was not at all bad, indicating that she dealt well with the use of English only in bilingual education. Notably, Tan “performed moderately well, getting perhaps B’s, sometimes B-pluses, in English,” (Tan 15). Aside from this her general command and understanding of the English language was quite good just from a young age.
In bilingual families, the mother tongue influence or the type of English spoken by the parents do affect the process of the learners learning the English language. Evidently, in the process of trying to understand both the English and their original languages, people in bilingual families end up adopting a new type of English that borrows from both sides and is used as a means of communication among close relations. The developed language affects the process of learning English in one way or the other. The three articles seem to agree on this one issue. To begin with in Rodriguez’s case, his parents used to communicate in Spanish at home while they used broken English in their communication in public. As he points out, in public places his “father and mother spoke a hesitant, accented and not always grammatical English.” (26). Rodriguez later notes that it was from his mother that he first learnt how to speak that kind of English that was considered a language of intimacy. With this in mind, it clearly means that he only knew the broken English that his mother spoke and therefore, this affected his learning of the language. He became slow to grasp the language because his parents did not encourage the use of the language at home and in the few cases that they did, it was seldom...