Lawmakers: Exempt Native youth from English learner program

[Aidan Wilson]

First, sorry to people who thread their emails, as this won't come up 
under the same thread; I inadvertently deleted the original posting before 
replying, and starting a 'new' thread screws with the message headers 
apparently.

Anyway, I'm a little dubious about this. I mean, whenever we hear about 
someone pushing English-only we go on about the ubiquity of 
multilingualism, and that speaking only one language is by far a rare 
thing on this planet, and as a corollary, children are entirely 
well-equipped to learn several languages without any of them impeding the 
others.

On the other hand, this move by these lawmakers is in response to some law 
saying that kids who don't have a good enough proficiency in English are 
basically forced to spend 4 hours a day using only English. These 
effectively English-only models are obviously to be avoided, but aren't 
these lawmakers just doing the same in the reverse direction? Not that I'd 
have a problem with it given the potential benefit to the language(s), but 
it seems to undermine our collective arguing for bilingual education as 
the best tool to ameliorate literacy in both L1 and L2.

Above all though, it's brilliant that indigenous languages are actually 
getting some kind of positive attention from people in power. We're still 
a long way away from that here in the far-eastern antipodes.

Just brainstorming, is all.

-- 
Aidan Wilson

The University of Sydney
+612 9036 9558
+61428 458 969
aidan.wilson at usyd.edu.au