Bilingual Education

by Nessa Wolfson

1988

Many Americans do not speak English as a mother tongue. We have always been a pluralistic society. Bilingual education is a political issue.

Bilingual education was widespread in America until World War I, when English-only became a nationalistic policy point.

In 1963 middle-class Cuban refugees flooded Dade COunty, Florida. Their teachers taught them in Spanish. At Coral Way school, 50% Anglo and 50% Cuban, half the instruction was in each language. Both groups came out bilingual and biliterate. At this time the civil rights movement made being ethnic a point of pride and contributed to the political pressure to educate bilingual children fairly.

The federal govt passed laws intended to help bilingual children receive the schooling they needed. Unfortunately, the laws are vague.

There are different ideas as to what should constitute bilingual education:

1. Submersion. They should be taught only in English. They'll catch on, as "millions" of people did in the early years of teh twentieth century.
2. ESL. Instruction in English as a Second Language, although Lau v. Nichols found that ESL by itself could not be considered adequate. "Pull-out" classes stigmatize students.
3. Immersion. Early grades: target language. As fluency in English increases, instruction in mother tongue introduced. First was St. Lambert experiment in Canada: parents voluntarily pt their English-speaking children in French immersion program. Very successful. Unfortunately, doesn't work in America very well.
   
4. Transitional Bilingual Education. Instruction in the mother tongue during early years, with gradual increase of instruction in English. The hope is to "mainstream" ESL students by high school. The problem is that it's hard to find teachers who can teach in the native language of EVERY minority group. Also, some groups, like the Hmong, have no background in formal schooling.
   
5. Maintenance Bilingual Education. Purpose of bilingual education is to maintain ethnic identity, language and culture. Often inspires fear and anger in conservative people who fear minority succession.
   

While opponents of bilingual education are quite vocal, the majority of Americans support bilingual education. Opponents are usually older people.

The AIR report found that bilingual education did not change students' scores in language and math. There are numerous problems with methodology, however. Test scores themselves are not a measure of whether bilingual education lessened drop-out rates or helped students get jobs after schooling. It measures academic ability and not interpersonal language skills.

TESOL will always play an important part in bilingual education.

Communicative Competence and Rules of Speaking

in Perspectives: Sociolinguistics and TESOL
by Nessa Wolfson

Problems in analyzing sociolinguistic rules.

Most ethnographic have been conducted on homogenous, traditional societies. The US is more diverse so it is more challenging, but there are similarities. Many books do not clearly distinguish between language and culture. "Language is an aspect of culture" -Goodenough

Knowledge about sociolinguistic rules are below the level of consciousness and native speaker intuition about sociolinguistic rules are often wrong. Bloom and Gumperz (1972) found out that in a small Norwegian town, the locals thought they spoke their dialect mroe often than they really did. Labov found that speakers reported the form they were targeting instead of the form they actually spoke.

Brouwer et al. (1979) thought that Dutch people would have gendered forms of language--they did, but what form they used depended on the sex of the addressee, not the speaker. Intuition is just unreliable, but usually speakers don't believe this.

Godfrey 1980 analyzed advanced ELL tense-changing "errors"--however, these "errors" mirrored NES historical present tense.

Pica (1983) found that textbooks don't tecah the actual rules of articles a and the.

Communicative competence should be taught to ELLs, but this instruction should not be based on NS intuition.

After Hymes introduced the idea of communicative competence, it began to be misapplied in ESL classrooms. Some teachers interpreted grammatical competence as seperate from cc instead of an aspect of it.

Canale and Swain in 1980 clarified the idea of c.c. 3 components: grammatical, sociolinguistic, and strategic c. Sociolinguistic competence has 2 components: discourse and sociocultural.

TESOL looked to the field of sociolinguistics for answers, but there were none. Sociolinguistics had to begin by defining, What is a speech community? Within one language there can be many speech communities with different rules for speaking. Defining the rules for speaking in English is useless, if you do not define the particular speech community. Neustopny observed that people who speak different languages (like Czech and Hungarian) can hold similar speaking rules.

It becomes almost impossible to identify subgroups.