Post 108: Bilingual Education and the American Identity

Post 108:What role does 'bilingualism' play in American identity?

If we take apart the word, 'bilingual', the prefix 'bi' means two and the suffix 'lingual' means languages. So literally, the word 'bilingual' means two languages. When we say that somebody is 'bilingual', we are saying that that is somebody who can speak two languages fluently.  If you speak three languages or more, you are considered 'multilingual' or a polyglot. To be a translator at the United Nations, you have to know 3 languages. This includes one European language, one non-European language, and of course English.

In Europe, China, Africa and other places around the world, it is common to see bilingual or polyglots because in Europe, you have many different countries rather close to each other so it is not unusual to see an Italian person know how to speak Italian, some French and some English. If you are from Africa, you have many tribes with different languages all close to each other, so it is not common for someone to speak many tribal languages, in addition to the national language of the African country and then English or French. In other places around the world, the attitude is the more languages you know, the better. Being bilingual is seen as an asset and as a stepping stone to higher paying jobs.

In the US, the emphasis is more on assimilating bilingual children to learn English and become proficient in English as quickly as possible even if that means the child loses his ability to speak his ancestral language. There is a common misconception that if a child focuses too much of his educational time preserving his heritage language in a bilingual program, he/she will lose time in learning English. Or that if children are exposed to too many languages at a time, they won't learn English as fast as monolingual speakers. This is all untrue.

In fact, when a baby/child/toddler below the age of 11 are exposed to many languages, he/she can learn all these languages with a perfect native like accent. After the age of 11, children can still learn many different languages, but their native accent will remain. Being bilingual in America is not as prestigious as being bilingual in Europe where being bilingual is seen as someone who is cultivated and sophisticated, almost worldly.  In the US, a person is considered 'educated' and 'worldly' if he/she can speak perfect English and English only. If you speak English with an accent and still retain your ancestral language, you are not looked upon as totally 'American'.

The very idea of American identity includes that all Americans speak English, all Americans speak Standard English (the kind of English you hear newscasters speak) without regional dialects. If you speak Spanish or Chinese, you are expected to 'assimilate' to English and lose that foreign accent and lose that ancestral language in order to be deemed 'American'.  Because the learning of English is of paramount importance to the American identity of what it is to be American, more importance is placed on learning English in education than there is for maintaining an immigrant's native language. This begs the question, is America a melting pot or a salad bowl?

The USA is traditionally called a melting pot because with time, generations of immigrants have melted together: they have abandoned their cultures to become totally assimilated into American society. ... - in a salad bowl cultures do not mix at all.  In the melting pot analogy, immigrant cultures and languages are forgotten or lost as succeeding generations of immigrants become assimilated and Americanized. By the third generation, none of the kids speak the ancestral language anymore. This is the melting pot theory as we all become Americans and only celebrate and live the American culture of hot dogs, hamburgers, Elvis Presley (for those over 65), and apple pie.  In the salad bowl theory, each immigrant culture gets to retain the flavor of their culture, traditions, language and food while still learning English and becoming acculturated to the American way of life. The salad bowl concept suggests that the integration of the many different cultures of United States residents combine like a salad, as opposed to the more traditional notion of a cultural melting pot. New York City can be considered as being a "salad bowl".

Bilingual Education is defined as teaching academic content in two languages. One of the purposes of Bilingual Education is for the student to preserve his/her ancestral language while still learning English.The goal for many Bilingual programs is for the student to learn academic content in the student's L1 while learning English L2. Once the student has reached sufficient English L2, then the student can be mainstreamed into the regular English monolingual classroom without falling behind his classmates while he/she is learning English. 

Jean Grosjean of Neuchatel University states as he quotes Barrack Obama, "When presidential candidate Barak Obama stated that children should speak more than one language, he was probably referring to the paradox one finds in this country: on the one hand, the world's languages brought to the United States are not maintained, and they wither away, and on the other hand only a few of them are taught in schools, to too few students, and for too short a time. A national resource - the country's knowledge of the languages of the world - is being put aside and is not being maintained.  

It is important to stop equating bilingualism with not knowing English and being un-American. Bilingualism means knowing and using at least two or more languages, one of which is English in the United States. Bilingualism allows you to communicate with different people and hence to discover different cultures, thereby giving you a different perspective on the world. It increases your job opportunities and it is an asset in trade and commerce. It also allows you to be an intermediary between people who do not share the same languages.

Bilingualism is a personal enrichment and a passport to other cultures. At the very least, and to return to Barak Obama's comment, it certainly allows you to say more than "merci beaucoup" when interacting with someone of another language. One never regrets knowing several languages but one can certainly regret not knowing enough."