[quote=outtamojo]I agree w/ everything you said CAR-with this to add: teaching non-english speakers in their native language in the early grades hurts them to no end. I grew up in non english speaking househld and went to grade school w/ a lot of others like me. When those others did not do well in class, guess where they were sent, straight to the bilingual class. Did their school work improve? No!
What happened to a lot of those was they got to speak their native tongue all the time and as we got older(high school) they were the kids who never assimilated, the ones who never had any friends that were not of the same race as them. If I had my way, any kinder kid who did not know english would be prescribed 5 hours of Sponge Bob everyday until they became fluent.[/quote]
This is an extremely complicated topic and one that I also have direct experience with. And I don’t have any answers, only observations.
There are two primary schools of thought. The first says that you want to teach (immigrant) kids the fundamentals of language in their mother tongue and then move them over the English as they establish the basic rules of language. Down in Chula Vista, for example, the bilingual programs try to start out the kids with 90% Spanish/10% English in 1st grade and then slowly add more English so that by 5th grade it’s about 50/50 and by the end of middle school it’s 90% English. I can see the logic behind this – that is, it looks good on paper – but I think it’s difficult to get the English to where it needs to be when both parents are speaking Spanish at home, which is the case more often than not. But if the kid starts into this system in 1st or 2nd grade, it probably works out alright. But if you join later in elementary school, you’ve probably got a long-term problem.
The second school of thought is immersion. Throw them into the deep end with English and after a couple of years of real struggle they pick it up and it’s off to the races. From what I can gather from people I know that are my age and moved here from Mexico as kids (30+ years ago), this is what happened with them. And they were glad for it. Most of these folks think the bilingual programs do more harm than good because they enable the kids to hang onto their Spanish. But these folks are also from households that basically stopped speaking Spanish in the home once they moved to California. A friend of mine who moved from Mexico when he was 7 said his parents insisted the whole family speak in English when they moved to California, despite the fact that their English wasn’t very good. But they learned quickly.
Anyhow, my point is that each school of thought has its proponents. I don’t know which one is better and I suspect it depends on the circumstances.
