Bilingual Education 2 Essay Research Paper Bilingual

Bilingual Education 2 Essay, Research Paper

Bilingual Education in the northeastern United States and Canada serves many advantages and benefits for students of limited English skills. Since the early sixty s, it continues to serve a great advantage to foreign students. This is important because it gives these students the opportunity to achieve the American Dream .

American educators have argued that the aim of education should be to assimilate a foreign student into the American mainstream, become good American citizens, and not keep their ethnic identity. The proponents of bilingual education believe that this form of instruction belittles a child s ethnic and cultural heritage, creates low self-esteem, and fosters a high dropout rate. Therefore, certain bilingual education approaches encourages students to maintain their language, ethnic and cultural identity, while at the same time learning a new language and culture altogether.

Bilingual Education provides instruction for students in two languages. The primary goal of bilingual education in the United States is to teach English to students who don t speak English or have limited English proficiency (LEP). Although Florida and California have decided to do away with this educational approach, the controversy regarding bilingual education will never end.

In this paper different bilingual education approaches will be defined and the history of Bilingual Education will be touched upon. The Proposition 227 controversy and several views towards bilingual education will be discussed. The final conclusion will show my feelings toward bilingual education.

There are many approaches that are used to instruct LEP students. Transitional bilingual education (TBE), which is currently incorporated in the NJ school systems, is geared to move LEP students into monolingual classes within two or three years. Programs such as this instruct students in their native language in the same academic level as their monolingual peers. After appropriate English proficiency level is achieved the LEP students are able to transfer skills to function successfully in a monolingual class. At the same time students are also enrolled in classes that teach them English as a second language (ESL) (CQ Researcher, 1996).

Bilingual proponents who prefer the developmental bilingual education (DBE) believe that the transitional approach defeats the whole purpose of bilingual education, because it doesn t maintain a student s native language. The critics prefer DBE because it is designed to teach both the students native language and English. Using this approach the student is able to enhance his or her skills in their native language and also be able to learn English up until sixth grade. The idea, they say, is to teach additive bilingualism, which makes students fluent in two languages while making them more nimble learners (CQ Researchers, 1996).

According to the article, Teaching English to Non-English Speakers offers a Wide Range of Techniques in the CQ Researchers (1996), the most sophisticated developmental approach is called two-way bilingual education. This approach mixes non-English speaking students with roughly an equal number of English speakers in the same classroom. Students are taught in one language in the morning and the other language in the afternoon. This approach gears to make both sets of students bilingual at levels of fluency that allow each to advance in language as well as in other subjects.

Such programs are rare, but where they exist, and where they have well trained bilingual teachers (teachers fluent in both languages and who use interactive or group-learning techniques), most researchers and observers say that students perform better at every energy level of learning than their peers, no matter what kind of instruction the non-two-way students receive (CQ Researchers, 1996).

Immersion education is another kind of teaching approach to bilingual education. In these classes, known as special alternative instructional programs, the most popular being structured immersion students learn their second language from instructors who teach them subject matter presented in the new language. While immersion is based on instruction in the student s second language, it is not what they call sink-or-swim . Sink-or-swim is when the teacher offers no extra help in learning the new language. The United States Supreme Court, in Lau v. Nichols(1974), declared that not offering extra help was a violation of federal civil rights law (CQ Researchers, 1996).

The St.Lambert French immersion program was inaugurated in 1965 in Canada. It was designed to provide proficiency in both aspects of the French language, to promote English proficiency, to ensure an appropriate developmental level of achievement in academic subjects, and to have the students understand and appreciate the French Canadian without taking away from the students identity for the English Canadian culture. These goals were shared by most of the immersion programs in Canada (cited in Paulston, 1988).

The final approach is called alternate immersion, also known as sheltered English or sheltered subject-matter instruction. In sheltered classes children learn their second language first by studying subjects. My aunt, Odainy Tansey, who teaches in a bilingual school in Passaic New Jersey, says that the school