I wonder if this would be true for Native languages

[Dr. MJ Hardman]

I remember way back when, after we from UF had helped install a genuinely
bi-lingual program in Miami schools, it was destroyed by exactly the same
logic.  In that program English-speaking students went to Spanish class
while Spanish-speaking students went to English class.  The children loved
it; they learned about language itself (very helpful for English-speaking
students who spoke a discriminated variety of their own language), and they
ended up bilingual in a city where it is necessary to be bilingual to get a
job.  It's gone.  MJ

On 3/25/12 1:42 AM, "Rudy Troike" <rtroike at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU> wrote:

> Re Andrew's question:
> 
>    Yes, dual language instruction would surely work, IF Native-language
> curricula were developed paralleling usual content in regular English-only
> classes. The situation vis-a-vis Spanish/English is that a weird backlash
> against 'bilingual education' developed, with opponents convincing the
> public that it was monolingual instruction in Spanish, dooming students
> to isolation from access to English (even a Yale professor of literature
> denounced bilingual education on these grounds, ignoring the obvious
> meaning of 'bi-', which was distorted to be interpreted as 'mono-').
> Ronald Reagan campaigned against bilingual education on these grounds,
> and part of the legacy of the Reagan Revolution was to pervert support
> for bilingual education into support for English as a Second Language
> (ESL) support. In California, even native Spanish-speaking voters were
> intimidated into supporting a referendum funded by a zealous businessman
> named Unz, who later brought the same initiative to Arizona, to outlaw
> bilingual instruction. The label 'dual language' was developed as a
> workaround to avoid the taint of the perversion of 'bi-' to mean 'mono-'.
> Also, critically, it more actively sought to recruit native English-
> speaking children into classes, and was often installed in magnet schools,
> where dual language instruction was made attractive, rather than treated
> as a ghettoizing program designed as remedial instruction for immigrants.
> (The educationally preposterous nature of the Arizona law is that if a
> child enters school unable to comprehend English adequately, he/she is
> denied placement in a program utilizing the child's native language, and
> is can only be admitted into bi-/dual language instruction once his/her
> competence in English is deemed adequate.) I think the same irrational
> and discriminatory provision applies in California, so except in schools
> on a reservation, this absurdity would have to be factored -- Native
> language could NOT be used until a child had demonstrated an adequate
> level of proficiency in English, by which time it might be too late to
> take maximum advantage of children's natural language learning ability.
> 
>    Rudy
> 

Dr. MJ Hardman
Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology
Department of Linguistics
University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida
Doctora Honoris Causa UNMSM, Lima, Perú
website:  http://grove.ufl.edu/~hardman/