Morning Ed: Politics {2016.04.26.T}

Alan Scott in reply to Dand says:

@dand , consider the following passage from the article:

As a teaching assistant in the UC system I’ve encountered some older students who exhibit a peculiar linguistic profile. Almost always Latino, they have a very mild accent in English, but are basically verbally fluent. But they are shockingly less fluent in written English. My first “wake-up” call was on a final exam where a student of mine asked for the definition of a word. My initial thought was “Dude, I can’t define scientific words for you, that’s your job.” It was the word composition. This is not an isolated incident. I’ve learned not to infer written fluency from verbal fluency for Latino students who are old enough to have gone through bilingual education as it was practiced in California in the 1990s.

That wasn’t particularly different from my first exposure to the students I tutored. Students who were conversationally fluent in English, but struggled with any kind of academic writing. But unlike the student interviewed, the students I worked with were too young to have gone through bilingual education in the 1990s. Indeed, I think the same thing is true for Khan’s students too, given that it’s 2016.

The students I worked with were born in the US, grew up in Spanish-speaking homes, and had been in English-only classes since kindergarten. And that’s not actually an atypical student profile for an English-language learner in 21st century California.

There are good windows and bad windows for immersive language education. That’s because the process for learning primary languages and secondary languages is different. Primary language learning begins near birth–the infant brain is an empty sponge, soaking up the ability to recognize and make sounds, words, and sentences.

But secondary language development is different. It’s harder in a certain way, because the brain is no longer that empty sponge that it was during primary language development. But in another way, it’s easier, because in developing primary language, they’ve also developed a common underlying proficiency.

As an example, consider this: you could learn the colors or numbers in a foreign language in an afternoon. But learning the colors and numbers in English took you months. It’s not that “one” or “red” are harder words than “uno” or “rojo”. It’s just that when you learned English, in order to learn your numbers, you needed to have an understanding of what numbers were, and you can rely on that same understanding as you learn about numbers in different languages.

So here’s the upshot when it comes to English-only education: Our kids start school at age five. And at age five, primary language acquisition isn’t anywhere close to being done. Which means that the common underlying proficiency that would help a student to learn English more quickly is still very limited.

Consider the article where Khan says he still speaks and reads Bengali with the fluency of a five-year old. That’s not to far off from the Spanish language skills of plenty of English-language learners in our nation’s schools.* Fortunately, Khan had a relative that was teaching him some English from an age early enough that it used the primary language acquisition pathway. Sure, he describes his skills as rudimentary, but even primary English speakers have rudimentary English skills when they’re five.

It normally takes a non-English speaking student five to seven years to develop academic English proficiency. When you deprive students of primary language acquisition in the way that English-only kindergarten does, it takes closer to ten–that’s what the studies in the article’s opening quote have found. I don’t think anyone wants to go back to a situation where 13-year-olds are in Spanish-only classes. But we also need to avoid a situation where blanket bans enacted by politicians actually make it harder for schools to teach English.

*The primary difference is that Spanish is spoken widely enough that Spanish speakers are more likely to continue to develop conversational language skills. But most Spanish-speaking students in English-language educational programs probably don’t have the academic language skills to write an essay in Spanish, for example.Report