Lau v. Nichols Supreme Court decision and bilingual advantages

[Rudolph C Troike]

I'm delighted with Mia's insightful input. I wanted to comment on several
points that she raised.

        1. With regard to why the English as a Second Language field is
behind the times in the use of technology, I think that it is partly a
result of the fact that few programs training people have any specialists
in this field. There is also a natural cultural lag. But Mia is 100% right
that computer technology allows for excellent teaching of oral language.
Susan Penfield and Phil Cash Cash have been working on precisely this
topic, and in the AILDI summer program you can see native teachers
learning exciting techniques for this very purpose. But this is only a
start.

        2. The Supreme Court decision in Lau v. Nichols in 1974 (we marked
the 30th anniversary this year) was only an advisory opinion, which
depended on the Justice Department developing guidelines for enforcing it.
The original case was brought against the San Francisco schools, and I was
involved (as Director of the Center for Applied Linguistics at the time)
in working with the SF schools in developing a plan for bilingual
education to respond to the Supreme Court decision. But in 1980, after
Reagan was elected, the Justice Dept., which had been actively enforcing
the decision, started back-tracking and watering down their enforcement,
and eventually the whole issue more or less disappeared and was forgotten.

        3. A dissertation I directed at the University of Illinois, by
Antonio Gonzalez, demonstrated that children from Mexico who attend school
there for two years before immigrating to the US do better in school than
their siblings who begin school here (and have two years more of English).
Navajo children who were exposed to Head Start in English did not develop
full control of Navajo grammar, and did worse in school than children who
were left alone and developed the Navajo better. The Rock Point school
proved that dual language instruction in Navajo and English produced
better results than an ESL program alone, but in spite of this evidence,
the community eventually back-slid in its support of the program. Just
being bilingual does not make one smarter, as it is common for speakers of
minority languages to suffer from what Wallace Lambert called "subtractive
bilingualism", in which they lose their native language as they gain more
command of the dominant language. It is "additive bilingualism" that has
cognitive benefits, and this comes from cultivating competence in the
native language alongside the dominant language.

        Rudy Troike
        University of Arizona