CONNECTICUT OPINION; EXPAND BILINGUAL EDUCATION
By JAMES W. RUSSELL; James W. Russell teaches sociology at Eastern Connecticut State University in Willimantic.
Published: March 22, 1987
IT was hard not to notice the sad irony of two recent articles about bilingual education in The New York Times. ''Bilingual Programs Are Under Attack'' in Connecticut Weekly on Feb. 22 reported that a motive behind the measure in the Connecticut General Assembly to declare English the state's official language is to end bilingual education.
Bilingual education is the program under which classes are taught in Spanish, primarily for Puerto Rican students who have not yet developed English proficiency. Teaching these children with the home language, according to critics, retards their English language assimilation and thereby causes problems for their future school performances.
Six weeks earlier the Times carried a glowing report on a program in Tusla, Okla., in which Anglo students could take kindergarten through second grades immersed in Spanish (''Why Foreign Languages Are Relevant Again,'' Jan. 4). By the end of the experience, the students had become orally fluent and verbally literate in Spanish. The article concluded that the Tulsa program was one of the few successes in the otherwise dismal record of foreign-language teaching in this country. There was a long waiting list of Anglo parents who wanted to enroll their children.
It does seem odd that Spanish language teaching for Puerto Rican students is being attacked in Connecticut as it is being promoted for Anglo students in Tulsa.
What justice, one might wonder, is there in taking away teaching in Spanish from Puerto Rican children while giving it to Anglo children? Why is it considered a liability for Puerto Rican children to learn in their language while, at the same time, an educational enhancement for Anglo children?
Bilingual education programs for minorities are seen and evaluated as transitional programs to get them out of their native languages and assimilated into English as effectively and quickly as possible. There are few who would deny the importance of learning English to get along and get ahead in this country. It is often overlooked that bilingual programs enable minorities to develop and maintain literacy in their native languages.
Literacy is a critical prerequisite for the transmission of any cultural heritage, especially that of a minority community that has to struggle harder than the dominant group to preserve its collective sense of identity. This is a positive function that bilingual programs fulfill.
They are the logical place for developing the skill of bilingualism among bicultural and other students. But bilingual programs suffer the stigma of being considered remedial when minority children are enrolled, although innovative when developed for Anglo children.
There is an obvious approach to meet the needs of Anglo parents who want their children to have an effective command of Spanish, and Latino parents who believe that their children need to become verbally literate and need to start school in the home language. The solution is to open existing bilingual programs to Anglo and other English-dominant students in the earliest grades when language acquisition is the easiest.
Rather than eliminating the programs or keeping them as they are, they could be expanded to include a whole new clientele. There are undoubtedly as many Anglo parents in Connecticut as there are in Tulsa who would eagerly enroll their children in such programs.
English-dominant students would be at an initial disadvantage in that atmosphere, but in the long run the payoff would be Spanish fluency and literacy. At the same time, Puerto Rican students would have the benefit of being in integrated classrooms in which their language was looked upon as a desirable skill rather than a liability.
The payoff for the society would be the beginning of a more effective approach to foreign-language training that takes advantage of rather than denigrates the language skills of its Spanish language minority, an approach to bilingualism of obvious value in a hemisphere in which English and Spanish are the leading languages.
The Tulsa experience as well as past ones in Toronto and Miami indicates that Anglo students in such early-grade immersion programs have little trouble switching into English in the third grade and catching up. In addition to having developed the command of a second language, they may have grown intellectually in other ways.
The transition, of course, is more problematic for the native Spanish speakers who enter in later grades into an immersion experience in English. Critics of bilingual education argue that these students do not do well because the Spanish language instruction in the earlier grades delayed their English language development. After three years in the United States, most children, including those who immigrate here at older ages, have picked up an English-speaking ability from a variety of sources. What causes some of their problems in school are factors traceable to social class, not language background. These are factors shared with other disadvantaged groups whose native language is English.
Students from low-income and working-class backgrounds, whatever the home language, are at a disadvantage in schooling atmospheres where middle-class skills have greater currency. If the minority graduates of bilingual education have later problems in school, it is not because they learned to be literate in their native language. It is because most immigrant groups in their situation are also low income and working class. These students would have had problems regardless of the language with which they started school, types of problems that are shared with Anglo students from similar social class backgrounds and problems that need to be addressed as such.
Eliminating the opportunity of bilingual education for the children of Puerto Rican and other Spanish-language minorities in Connecticut will do them no favor. It is a false prescription for improving later school performance. At the same time, eliminating bilingual education would squelch the unused opportunity that many communities in the state have to develop effective early-age language training in Spanish for Anglo and other English-dominant children.