Bilingual Education

         In “Aria” by Richard Rodriguez, the author reflects on his own education as a bilingual student and his experience seems largely negative. He mentions his teachers, nuns at a Catholic school, insisting that he speak English all of the time. He writes “What they understood was that I needed to speak a public language”. He describes the nuns coming to his house to ask his parents to use more English at home and details how this caused his household to fall silent. There was less interaction between him and his family because of the pressure to speak more English in the home. This experience seems to be the opposite of the type of education that is explained in “Teaching Multilingual Children” and the Teaching Bilinguals web series.

In Teaching Multilingual Children by Virginia Collier, the author goes over several guidelines when teaching these students and these practices are in direct conflict with the education experience of Rodriguez. The guideline that stands out particularly is the third, which states “Don’t teach a second language in any way that challenges or seeks to eliminate the first language”. In other words, students should be encouraged to use their first language and the second language shouldn’t be taught as if it is superior or ‘correct’. The nuns in Rodriguez’s school seemed to be doing just that. They wanted Rodriguez to speak English at all times and practice it at home, to the point that his parents only spoke in English with him. In these ways, his first language was marginalized and eliminated from his daily life. They taught him English as if to replace his first language, not coexist with it in his life.

The videos in the web series advocate for the use of the first language to help students with their second language. The web series focuses on the strengths of a bilingual education and using an asset rather than an obstacle. One teacher discusses having students write in their native language as a form of pre-writing in order to get their ideas out before figuring out how to express some of those ideas in English. This is so important because these teachers are using the students’ native languages as tools to aid the learning of the new language. Rodriguez’s educational experience can be characterized by an all or nothing attitude: either fully embrace English and speak it at all times or fail to learn the language. The modern concept of a bilingual education is that both languages can exist simultaneously and students can even use the first language as a means to help learn the second language. The web series contained a lot of helpful ways to embrace bilingual learners in the classroom and incorporate their own cultures and languages into the learning. This article on Education Week also contains a lot of strategies to use when teaching bilingual learners. It can be scary and challenging to teach these learners without being bilingual but it is crucial to embrace their home languages in this instruction.