Bilingual Education (BE) and/or English as a Second Language (ESL)

RUNNING HEAD : BILINGUAL EDUCATION OR ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

Bilingual Education (BE ) and /or English as a Second Language (ESL

[Name of the Author]

[Name of the Institute]

[Name of the Course]

History

Bilingualism is a word that is used to define a characteristic of an individual as well as a social institution . Either ways , the has been subjected to controversy . On an individual level the argument revolves around the potential costs and benefits of bilingualism in students learning English . However on the societal level , fiery argument is

being witnessed in the U .S . about the insight of bilingual education and the official support of languages other than English in public institutions . The threshold of a new year , a new century , and a new millennium is a natural time for taking stock of current status of social trends . This coincides with a dramatic reconsideration of the 30 year policy called bilingual education . The years of heaviest immigration to the U .S , from the latte 1880s through the 1960s , might have characterized as the "early stone age " of education policy for immigrant children . There was no policy . Children were left to sink or swim , to make progress , unassisted , in learning the common language of the school and the community

People believed that young children naturally pick up a new language without any help . Those who did learn English well enough and soon enough proceeded with their schooling those who were not so adept at language acquisition dropped out of school and went to work in factories or on farms (Baker de Kanter , 1983 ) The controversy surrounding bilingualism is magnified by a sense of changing demographic picture . In the U .S , there are over 30 million individuals for whom English is not the primary language of the home . Of those , 2 .5 million are children in the school age range , with this number expected to double by the year 2000 . There are now many states in which the linguistic-minority school population is approaching 25 or more in many large urban school districts throughout the U .S , 50 of the students may come from non-English-speaking homes . Beginning in 1968 with the passage of Bilingual Education Act , Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act , a new era of official concern for immigrant , migrant , refugee , and local born non-English speaking children prompted official action . From 1968 to 1998 , the movement to help these children learn English for an equal education opportunity was quickly turned into the state mandated reliance on a one-size-fits-all experiment called Transitional Bilingual Education -what might be termed the "Iron Age " of bureaucratic heavy-handedness

Analysis of Bilingual Education

Bilingualism considered as a simple bi-variate function of language expertise in two languages , under-represents the ins and outs of the social setup . The history of research on bilingual students contains many false inferences about the effects of bilingualism based on a miscalculation of the complexity of the phenomenon . Bilingual education programs have been in existence for over two decades , and...