My first post was accidentally deleted, so here is the 2nd version:
After reading Aria, it seems to me that Richard Rodriguez promotes the necessity of an essentially immersive language experience. Once English became the primary language at home, at the behest of his teachers, his English understanding and speaking abilities quickly and vastly improved, not only did it do this, it also gave him the ability to assimilate into American society, to not feel like an outsider. However, this was at the expense of his “private individuality”, his home life and the special relationship he shared with his parents, his family, because to him, he associated speaking Spanish as a comfort of home, safety, familiarity. When his English improved, and he was able to participate in the outside world, his classroom, American society, he truly began to feel like an American citizen, a feeling he had not had before due to his inability to speak the language. However, the “special feeling of closeness at home was diminished by then. Gone was the desperate, urgent, intense, feeling of being at home; rare was the experience of feeling myself individualized by family intimates. We remained a loving family, but one greatly changed. No longer so close, no longer bound tight by the please and troubling knowledge of our public separateness. Neither my older brother nor sister rushed home after school anymore. Nor did I.” To Rodriguez, the loss of individuality is a necessary evil that must happen, because the “value and necessity of assimilation” is worth it. The ability to speak English gave him the ability to assimilate into public society, which therefore enabled him to achieve public individuality. “Without question it would have pleased me to hear my teachers address me in Spanish when I entered the classroom, I would have felt much less afraid. I would have trusted them and responded with ease. But I would have delayed - for how long postponed?-having to learn the language of public society. I would have evaded - and for how long could I have afforded to delay? - learning the great lesson of school, that I had a public identity”.
In Teaching Multilingual Children, Collier stresses the importance of allowing students to continue to use their home language while also teaching them English, and also teaching them academic content in their home language, because “academic language does not come to kids automatically just because they are in a dominant English-speaking locale. Academic language is context-reduced and intellectually more demanding. Context-reduced communication relies heavily on linguistic cues alone. It involves abstract thinking. It is what we think of when we speak about academic instruction at secondary and adult levels. When language-minority students work academically only in the second language, it seems to take them from five to seven years to master commonly accepted age-grade norms in context-reduced aspects of English proficiency. Furthermore, academic skills developed in the first language tend to automatically transfer to the second language.” Per Collier, it is often assumed that if someone can converse in English, then they can learn in English and be equal academically to their peers whose primary language is English. “English-language learners who can chat comfortably in English do not automatically develop the academic language skills needed to compete.” In this text, “seven guidelines are offered to better understand how teaching English to second-language learners can become an enriching experience while appreciating students’ different languages and life situations”. The acceptance of code-switching, the alternate use of two languages, is encouraged by Collier, as it “is a display of the integrated and sophisticated use of both languages” and “might produce better academic results than a constant preoccupation with maintaining a single language”.
I can understand the arguments of both authors, the pros and cons of each. We know language immersion works to learn how to speak and understand a language - immersion programs are offered all the time to those seeking to learn a language. Rodriguez, like Delpit, realizes the importance of learning the language of society, as it is part of learning the “culture of power”, which helps learners to succeed within that society and culture. Emotions aside, if one wants to be successful in America, knowing English is going to help, and complete immersion will work - but at what cost? For Richard Rodriguez, it came at the expense of his relationship with his parents, as the more he and his siblings learned English, the wider the divide between them and their parents became, as they seemingly lost touch of their own culture. Collier counters this, providing a more inclusive option that embraces learning English while not diminishing home language and culture. She stresses the importance of embracing home languages while also teaching English, and explaining how providing academic education in English while simultaneously teaching the language itself is a disservice, and extremely difficult for students. She encourages educators to allow students to use their own language in the classroom, and to teach academics in their initial language, as it is easier for students to transfer that information to English. This of course sounds ideal, but is it always possible? When schools have a student population that speaks various languages, most probably don’t have the resources to be able to do this.
No comments:
Post a Comment