Bilingual Education: Its Effectiveness on Forming Identity

Bilingual Education : Its Effectiveness on Forming Identity

It is somewhat difficult to grow up in crisis of dealing with who you really are . Living in a country that is far from your native land does only force you to adapt to changes in environment , but you have to imbibe its language as well . In Richard Rodriguez 's personal essay Aria : Memoirs of a Bilingual Childhood (2001 , he voices out his experiences as a bilingual child

Now , many years later , I hear of something called "bilingual education a scheme proposed in the late

1960s by Hispanic-American social activists , later endorsed by a congressional vote . It is a program that seeks to permit non-English-speaking children (many from lower class homes ) to use their "family language " as the language of school . Such at least , is the aim its supporters announce . I hear them , and am forced to say no : It is not possible for a child , any child , ever to use his family 's language in school . Not to understand this is to misunderstand the public uses of schooling and to trivialize the nature of intimate life . Memory teaches me what I know of these matters . The boy reminds the adult - I was a bilingual child , but of a certain kind "socially disadvantaged " the son of working-class parents , both Mexican immigrants (p . 25-26

The prevalence of Spanish speaking people in the US is a known fact . The language has persisted to a much greater degree than other non-English languages for many reasons . Most contemporary immigration to the US is from Spanish-speaking countries . Spanish speakers are overwhelmingly the largest non-English-language group in the country . They comprise over half of those who generally speak a language other than English at home Spanish-language institutions and media are well established in many parts of the country , and using Spanish alongside English has become key to Latino political identity and efficacy - in both symbolic and practical terms . Noting the persistence of Spanish in the US , Zolberg and Long (1999 ) declare "Spanish is here to stay . With the questions of where Spanish will stay ' as an element of bilingual education will it suffice the expectations of individual-level factors that influence the decision to maintain or learn Spanish , or to see as bilingual children do so ? Is it really effective in forming the identity of a person

Bilingualism at the societal level and bilinguality at the individual level , are an integral part of human behavior . With globalization and increasing population movements and the spread of education , contacts between cultures and individuals are constantly growing . While bilingual individuals already outnumber monolinguals , it can be expected that this trend will continue in the twenty-first century (Blanc Hamers , 2003 Thus , it is important to outline the trends of globalization in line with multiculturalism , to understand the effect of bilingual education as a whole

Globalization and Multiculturalism

With the globalization going around , the continuing spread of English has resulted in more people speaking and learning English as a second or foreign language than native...