Iowa, "the English-only State," suspends student for refusing English proficiency test

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

Iowa, "the English-only State," suspends student for refusing English
proficiency test

Lori Phanachone, a senior at Storm Lake High School in northwest Iowa,
who's spoken English all her life, has been suspended from school for
refusing to take an English-language proficiency test.
Phanachone found the English Language Development Assessment, a test
required annually of all students considered by the state to be non-
English speakers, both "insulting and degrading."

Phanachone, who told the Storm Lake Pilot Tribune, "I could have aced
it in first grade," actually passed the proficiency test as a
sophomore, when her family moved to Storm Lake, but after she was told
to retake the test the following year she began to see it as
discriminatory and answered questions randomly. When she was told to
take the test again this year, she refused outright. . .



Read more about the plight of the child whom school authorities are
threatening to leave behind:



read the rest of this post on the Web of Language: http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage

____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://illinois.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org