> goodyear wrote: > > > > Hi my name is scott goodyear and I am trying to start a web page > > on bilingual esl and culture in the US and Oregon. > jim blair: Hi, Just to point out that ESL and bilingual education are not the same: actually they are opposite ways of dealing with the same issue. >J. Manuel Urrutia" >Buzz words, that is all... ESL and bilingual education have been called just "buzzwords". but they are not JUST buzzwords: I think it clear that we have two different CONCEPTS here: Teach English, and then teach subject matter in English. Or, try to teach subject matter in language X and teach English at the same time. This is an impossible task. Where has it worked? The problem is "available teachers". People talk as if "bi" means "two", but for the school system it means dozens. This is not just a question of Spanish. According to a news article , there are 2,655 students enrolled in the Salem MA bilingual/esl programs and over 23 native languages spoken and 14 are not even represented by teachers or staff. In California, the public schools are struggling to educate students in more than 80 languages. In the Washington, D.C. area, it is not uncommon for teachers to have a dozen language groups represented in a classroom. Now we get to the reason it can't work. Frankly, the US cannot even find enough teachers who know both math and English. Or science and English. How can you find enough who know math and English and Hmong? Simple math problem: Say we have 6 subject areas. How many combinations are there of "English" and 6 subjects, and 80 languages? And how many teachers in the country know one of the 6 subjects, English, and one of the 80 languages at the same time? As long ago as the 1960's I read a report on US college graduates. The top HS students (based on ACT & SAT) were majoring in science, math, engineering and business. The middle group was scattered over many majors. The very bottom were majoring in education. I have not read of this changing. And I think the country is suffering as a result. An ESL class requires only that the teacher knows English. Students in the same class can speak Spanish or Hmoung or French or whatever. HOW TO DEAL WITH LEP's? If they are few, put all the students of Limited English Proficiency together in one class, whatever their first language (including Ebonics) and what ever their grade/age, and teach them English As a Second Language. If there are more, establish one such class for each 10 students, and group them by their level of English ability. The higher the level, the more "content" to be included along with the English. Full time. Until the students can handle regular classes, then they can enter at whatever level they are ready for. Lets face it, kids don't learn much in US grade schools now: the LEP's would not be very far behind, and learning English is more important for them than learning whatever it is that grade schools teach these days instead of science or math or geography. This is working pretty well in Israel: immigrants typicallly speak only Russian, or French, or Arabic, or English. They are all put in a "total immersion" Hebrew school (ulpon) until they know enough Hebrew to learn subject matter taught in it. (well actually English is a sort of unofficial second language there, but the country is officially bi-lingual in Hebrew and Arabic. Very few speak both) Back to Wisconsin. Here Blacks claim they need bi-lingual ed in Ebonics and English. But the Hmong are already doing better in school than either Blacks or "Hispanics", but there is no bi-lingual ed for them. So they learn English fast. IS LANGUAGE A "SUBJECT"? When people need to learn a language, they learn it quickly. Especially when they are young. I was a college teacher and spent a summer in Israel with my wife and 2 kids, ages 3 and 8. I tried to study Hebrew a little, but was mostly with people who could speak English. At the end of the summer, I knew very little Hebrew. But both of my kids could speak it pretty well. I was surprised when my 8 year old son was counting some things: "ehod, steim, shlosh, arba",...etc. And when the kids were loud out side the apartment my 3 year old would shout "SHEKIT! HABITA!" (roughly, BE QUIET, GO HOME!) Neither of the kids "studied" Hebrew, they just played with the kids in the neighbourhood, and learned it from them. I agree that OTHER subjects like math and history should be taught in short 40 minute classes, with time in between to "digest". I have heard bilingual advocates claim (with a straight face) that the OLDER people are, the easier they learn a second language! (because they have better "study habits") I claim that language is unlike other subject matter. 5 year old kids all over France speak French (typically better than US college students who study French), but few if any of those kids studied French. But this does not apply to physics: the US college physics students know more physics than the French 5 year olds. French is DIFFERENT than physics. They are looking at language as if it were a subject, to be taught like other subjects. This is commom in the US. And it is the reason that language is so poorly taught in the US. The US education establishment is not doing a very good job of teaching language. Any language. The US military found that even college graduates who majored in a foreign language could not speak that language well enough, so they created the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey California. There they approach the teaching of language the same way Hebrew is taught in the Israeli ulpon: by TOTAL IMMERSION. The UW has, for example, French House for students of that language. They speak only French any time they are home: meals, evenings. etc. They import students from France to live there and speak French. This total immersion concept has proven to be the most effective way to teach a language. I studied Spanish for 2 years in college. I got A's & B's, and could once read Mystical poetry from the middle ages in the original. But I could never carry on a conversation in Spanish. I have experience studying language in the traditional way. And also living in foreign countries: when I can get by on English, there was not much progress in learning the native language. But I think I would pick it up fast it that were necessary. On studies, the way to "test" this would be to randomly divide the English deficient students in a school system into two groups and teach one group with bilingual ed (which might require subdiving them again into X different language groups), and the other group ESL (with an equal number of teachers) and see how each group does 5 years later. But I doubt that this kind of evaluation has ever been done, or ever will be done. But what I do see is this: students who arrive in Madison with little or no English and have no bilingual "help" seem to do BETTER than the ones who get the bilingual ed. And here I mean some Russian immigrants a few years ago, and the Hmong, as compared to "Spanish speaking". There was a recent story in the local paper about how the Hmong students do better in school than the black and "Spanish speaking" students, and score almost as well as the "white English speakers" on various exams. This was followed by several letters from the education establish complaining that this should not be used to question the need for bilingual education. I waited for an explaination as to WHY this did not suggest that bilingual education was not doing more harm than good, but none was given. Instead the letter just pleaded for MORE bilingual teachers: this shows we need bilingual teachers for the Hmong too, they claimed! Aren't the Chinese and Japanese examples of students have done very well in US schools WITHOUT bilingual education? The few we have in Madison seem to end up at the top of their class. But I doubt that any teacher in the school system speaks either language. I would like to see some data on this, but I would guess that recent immigrants who do NOT have the "benefit" of bilingual education do better in school than those who do. We have immigrants from Russia, China and Japan besides the Hmong. I would predict that they do better in school than those with bilingual education. Show me some data that says otherwise. But did you read the TIME "Man of the Year" story of Andy Groves? He fled from Hungry to the US as a teenager, He knew no English when he got here but few years later graduated from CCNY with a chemistry degree. They did not have Hungarian/English bilingual education. His hardest course was English Literature: he had trouble with Faulkner. (no wonder!) LAU v NICHOLS In 1974, the Supreme Court decided in Lau v. Nichols that students who do not know English must be given special assistance in school. The nature of this assistance was not specified. Several possible methods were mentioned as acceptable, including bilingual education. Within the federal agencies, however, the Lau decision was interpreted as a mandate for bilingual education. It was initially sold as a transitional program that would quickly lead immigrant children to the regular English curriculum. However, a bilingual education establishment quickly grew up and wanted to retain students in their native language environment for much of their schooling. In addition, maintaining the students' culture now has become a goal of bilingual education. The educational results of this segregation by language have been disappointing, especially in learning English. Politically, however, the existence of a body of young people uncomfortable in English and alienated from the mainstream serves the purposes of ethnic politicians very well. ,,,,,,, _______________ooo___(_O O_)___ooo_______________ (_) jim blair (jeblair@facstaff.wisc.edu) Madison Wisconsin USA. This message was brought to you using biodegradable binary bits, and 100% recycled bandwidth.