Legal Problems of Dominicans Citizens that have Illegal Parents

Language Diversity and Schooling

By: Carina Marinangeli

“When you are an immigrant, many doors are closed. Well, yes, some, some are open-but they are hidden. Without help, I can’t find them”.

This is a quote by Edgar Stritikus, a 15-year-old immigrant student from Mexico. He expressed his feelings in a new country with new customs and culture for him. As we, teachers, see the ethnicity and diversity in the classrooms, they see the differences between their culture and their partners’ ones. Mainly when we come across with students from different nationalities from ours, we should try to put on their shoes. I mean, to try to understand them.

Immigration continues to be one of the primary sources for linguistic diversity in the United States. While immigration has a tremendous impact on all of American life, nowhere has this been more keenly felt than in U.S. public schools. But diversity is increasing here in our country, maybe not as in the U.S., but we have immigrants from many different countries in any place of our Dominican Republic. Besides Haitians, we can commonly find Chinese, Japanese, Peruvians, and people from anywhere in our classrooms.

It is important to say that there are similarities and differences between the issues faced by “old” and “new” immigrants. At this time, technology has widely developed and this issue affects the immigrants positively at the point that all countries are interconnected through it. This phenomenon is called globalization, borderless economies, and/or the transnational era. The back and forth movement of ideas and goods that characterizes this transitional period also parallels the experience of many immigrant students. The current movement serves to replenish social and cultural practices. So, immigration must be viewed as a dynamic social phenomenon. This phenomenon makes students more diverse than ever exhibiting a dramatic range in educational

level, social class, and economic capital. However, not everything is positive, there is an anti immigrant ideology that affects the way that immigrants and refugees.

As I said before, we, Dominicans, have immigrants from all over the world; the same issue occurs in school districts throughout the United States, but in a larger scale. United States is called “the country of opportunities.” The total number of ELL students in the United States is probably double the number reported by federal statistics, which have traditionally undercounted the total number.

Immigration is not the only contributor to linguistic diversity; dialect variation contributes to our diverse tapestry of language use. We must notice that the distinction between dialect and languages has more to do with political, social, and cultural factors than specific linguistic distinctions between the two. Because dialects variations tend to be associated with race, social class, and geographic region, the dialects of groups with less social power tend to be viewed as inferior or incorrect versions of Standard English. In order to demonstrate the links between language and politics in the United States, historians and linguists have referred to the case of German Americans and how the support for the German language decreased over time.

The Bilingual Education Act (BEA), Title VII, signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, acted as legislation which sought to provide compensatory education for students who were both economically and linguistically disadvantaged in schools. A large part of the BEA’s inability to move toward a well defined language policy was that law did not recommend a particular instructional approach; rather it provided funding for development, training, and research of innovative approaches to the education of ELL students. While native language instruction was originally recommended, the BEA did not specify that it must be used.

Kinney Kinmon Lau and 12 Chinese American students on behalf of about 1,800 Chinese-speaking students filed a class-action suit against the San Francisco School District stating that their children were not given equal educational opportunities because of the linguistic barriers they faced. This legacy has created important contributions to the improvement of programs for ELL students, even if vague. Policy guidelines which were by the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) were put together in the LAU remedies in 1975 for the school district’s compliance with the Title VI requirements upheld in the Lau decision.

The mandates of bilingual and bidialectal education have been controversial. Many arguments have been adopted such as students will not learn English if they use their native language or dialects at school or the assertion that it simply does not work. The Reagan administration acted on these beliefs by reducing funding or the Bilingual Education Act. Nevertheless, English as a second language (ESL) and transitional bilingual education became the most favored approaches promoted by the mainstream media and the general public. On the other hand, the English Only movement manifested that the language as problem orientation has been the predominant one in the United States’ public sphere as stated Hornberger in 1990. They also argue that to preserve the unity of the United States, English should become the official language.

A variety of instructional have been devised and implemented over the last several decades to meet the educational needs of linguistically diverse students. The major program types that schools have designed and implemented are: Submersion, English as a Second Language (ESL), Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE), Maintenance Bilingual Education (MBE), and Dual Language Programs.

Colin Baker in 2001 explains that some citizens viewed bilingual education as failing to foster social integration and as a waste of public funds. Rossel and Baker reviewed 72 “scientifically methodologically acceptable” studies and they concluded that bilingual education was not superior to ESL instruction, particularly in reading achievement.

Becoming proficient in a language or dialect can take on different meanings in various social, academic, and personal settings. A distinction needs to be made between learning languages, socially and academically. Language is a complex system of communication that includes pragmatics, syntax, semantics, morphology, and phonology. Teachers need to develop awareness that students from diverse linguistically and culturally backgrounds participate in different ways.