Bilingual teachers can't speak english

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by mindseye
Has anyone in this thread studied a technical subject like mathematics or chemisty in a language they were not proficient in?

Yes. In my political/social sciences studies in Germany, I had to study everything in German (I did only learn the language at school before). Political and social sciences can get technical, but it wasn't too hard because they were wholly new courses to all students (meaning, all the technical words were thoroughly explained).

But one of the courses was Statistics, done very mathematically. I couldn't understand anything since I wasn't used to simple mathematical German words such as "multiplied" or "divided", or even "curves", "mean" etc. I'd have loved having this course in French, to actually understand where the prof was going.
I still managed to understand the equations (well, they weren't in Geman ), but I didn't know at all about there use, or about how they came about. The only way for me to pass the exam was to learn the equations by heart, and to recognize when they were demanded.
Needless to say, I have forgotten everything the day I knew I had the exam

[cinch]

Originally posted by Dom Pedro II
My Spanish teacher couldn't speak English at all.

My French teacher couldn't speak French at all.

I blame that for my lack of bilingualism!

[mindseye]

Originally posted by DinoDoc

Has anyone in this thread studied a technical subject like mathematics or chemisty in a language they were not proficient in?

Does this somehow mean that bilingual teachers shouldn't be bilingual?

No, it means:

I'm curious about the experiences of others.

You seem to have a bit of trouble reading. Is English your primary language?

[mindseye]

Question:
In bilingual programs, are the teachers supposed to teach in both languages, or are there courses in another language (e.g. math in Cambodian) coupled with English language training (i.e. in another class)?

If the former, I fail to see why the foreign teachers need to be more than basically proficient in English. If the latter, they need to be.

[Dis]

I could go on and on about bilingual education.

It's a waste of money.

California already has a more effective program. Teach the students in English.

But my sorry as state hasn't learned from California's mistakes (they used to have bilingual education), we still have bilingual education. And consequently we have the lowest reading scores in the nation.

If you teach in Spanish, they will never learn English.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by mindseye
Has anyone in this thread studied a technical subject like mathematics or chemisty in a language they were not proficient in?

I once dated a Vietnamese guy who earned a technical degree in computers (studying things like Assembly language), even though his English was pretty elementary. I'm curious about the experiences of others.

While I sympathize with some of the author's intentions, the piece has some serious flaws.

four Cambodian-born teachers who flunked

What was the test like? How large is the supply of Cambodian-speaking teachers in the Lowell area? If they were teaching in Cambodian, how well did they need to speak English?

Massachusetts teachers (...) have been flunking an oral examination in which they are asked to (...) describe their jobs (apparently they don't even know how to say "foreign languages").

Notice that we don't know which part of the oral test they actually flunked, it's the columnist's jab that they did not know how to say "foreign languages". For all we know, they flunked because they couldn't explain what a past participle is. I wonder if the test they took was similar to the American TOEFL test, which is not a very reliable indicator of one's English-speaking abilities (it's a better indicator of one's ability to memorize long lists of obscure, seldom-used words).

I understand all the good reasons not to create an academic ghetto, but I think arguments to completely scrap bi-lingual teaching are terribly short-sighted (and usually made by mono-linguists). Wouldn't it be better to fix the proram? How about easing the kids into learning in English? Wouldn't that be a better idea all-around?

As to those who advocate abandoning the program altogether, I wonder how well their children would do studying chemistry in Cambodian? Would they really "pick up" Cambodian, or would they get frustrated and drop out?

This whole thing started in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was part of a larger movement to address the lower academic achievement measurements among some minority populations in the U.S. This was a time when ethnic identity politics were gaining a lot of traction both among the small educated elites within these communities as well as with white liberals. The main idea behind these movements was that the reason some groups fared badly academically was because of racism.

One part of this larger movement consisted of school "bussing", which was forced integration in school systems and sometimes larger metropolitan areas in order to create conditions whereby minority populations would have access to equivalent school funding. This was actually the most sensical of all the programs designed to improve the academic achievement of certain minority groups, as there was (and still is) often a large discrepancy in the quality of schools in metropolitan areas as well as within some school systems.

Even so bussing failed miserably for a couple of reasons. For one thing it created / exacerbated a phenomenon known as "white flight", where mostly caucasian populations simply moved outside of metropolitan areas in order to avoid desegregation as well as crime and lower academic standards and resources. The other reason that bussing failed is in part why all of these programs failed outright or at least failed to meet their goals. These programs failed to take into account that culture played a role in academic achievement. This was obvious to the astute observer even then, but it was not politically correct to say so. Indeed these programs had a fairly large constituency among people who were willing to do anything within reason to heal the racial scars in this country which had been rubbed so raw in the 1960s.

Another program involved the placement of minority teachers in schools which contained minority students. This program was strongly supported by identity political groups (moreso than bussing) who saw not only an opportunity to vindicate their belief that racism was the root cause of their group lagging behind academically, but an opportunity to employ members of their group as teachers as well. This program was a dismal failure, in large part because in order to quickly put enough minority teachers into place in what had largely been a white dominated profession, professional standards had to be tossed out the window. Additionally, these new teachers were inexperienced and faced very challenging tasks that simple racial or cultural similarity couldn't make up for.

The smallest program was the one that had the most longevity, bilingual education. It has always been mainly the provenence of the Hispanic or Chicano community, and as those communities have tended to either remain outside the political debate (in the case of the newer immigrants, long term Hispanic populations in the U.S. tend to be much more assimilated and often unaffacted by bilingual education) in the U.S. in large part, it was a fairly simple matter for a group of mostly left-wing educational theorists and Chicano activists to set the terms of and dominate the debate about bilingual education.

The theory behind bilingual education (as implemented) such as it is, is that students who speak a foreign language at home (overwhelmingly Spanish) fall behind at school while they are learning English, especially in other subjects. So the idea to remedy this self-described and unproven problem was to place them in special classes away from native English speaking students where they would receive instruction in their native language while learning English more or less as other students would learn a foreign language. At some point in the future these children would be "mainstreamed" into regular integrated classrooms, often in high school.

It is amazing to me that this was ever allowed to happen. It was well-known at the time that immersion is a vastly superior means to learn a language, especially for children who don't yet understand grammar in a technical or theoretic sense. It was also known that most children have the innate ability to pick up languages much more quickly than all but the most expert of adult language students. Unfortunately this ability dissipates over time as the child's brain matures. Anyone who doubted these facts could be referred to decades of successful immersion that had taken place from the late 1800s up to the present time among vastly different ethnic groups who had recently arrived in the United States. But instead of going with a proven and by most accounts a staggeringly successful model, bilingual education advocates put forth a model that was doomed to failure. While the children can easily learn new languages they are taught in their native tongue. Then once their capacity for picking up new languages is mostly in the past, they are put into classrooms where only English is spoken and are expected to not only learn English, but the subjects being taught as well.

I think it was allowed to happen for a couple of reasons. There was a very measurable lag in almost every measure of academic achievement in Hispanic students generally, and those students who had come from Mexico and Central America (the vast majority) in particular. Only African-Americans lagged behind more. Secondly the idea of a whole new type of teaching appealed to the educational establishment as well as Chicano political groups who saw an opportunity to shape members of their own ethnic group as well as build themselves a fiefdom in education. There was imo also a degree of not so benign neglect on the part of the larger society in general, and the educational establishment in particular. Just as these groups were all too happy to turn over the education of Black students in the inner city to ill-prepared black teachers, so they were willing to turn over the education of Hispanic immigrants to often Hispanic idealogues. But there can be no doubt that a lot of this neglect was due to the fact that many in positions of power simply didn't want to get into a nasty fight with the identity groups who pushed for these measures the hardest.

The whole thing was a massive failure from the start, the good faith efforts of some teachers notwithstanding. How could it not fail? But interestingly it was not abandoned for 30 years, and still holds on in some places today. This is a testament to the furious rear-guard actions of the teachers unions in general and the associations of bilingual teachers in particular, as well as ethnic identity groups. It is important to understand that most ethnic groups never "benefited" from this program at all, as they often didn't have the sort of concentrations necessary to form entire classes in a school system. Additionally, their communities had often seen the long term success of immersion on previous generations of immigrants and were in no hurry to have their children used as lab rats to grind the political and professional axes of others. This had the effect of dividing and conquering potential opposition to these programs.

What has signalled the death knell for bilingual education in the U.S. has been the awakening of the Hispanic community politically both generally and specifically on this issue. Both in California and here in Colorado Hispanic groups have formed to counter the older identity political groups on the issue of bilingual education, and this has given almost everyone else the political cover to look at the data and call bilingual education for what it is, a massive failure over 30 years. The referendum has been used to do what many democrats have been afraid to do for fear of crossing the teachers unions and radical Chicano groups, which is phase out bilingual education in favor of immersion.

One final note, it is a shame that this abomination has managed to co-opt the term "bilingual education", as real bilingual education (ie immersion in two languages) would be of great benefit to young students imo.

[Caligastia]

Bloody hell Sikander, is that all just off the top of your head?

[mindseye]

Thanks for the thoughtful summary, Sikander. Appreciate the typing.

[Sikander]

Cali,

Yes, I didn't do any research to write it. I was a social studies geek and paper boy during those years, so I paid a lot of attention to what was going on. Having been a bilingual child while growing up myself, I was always fascinated that they abandoned immersion.

MindsI,

You're welcome.

[Dis]

yes that was an excellent post Sikander, thanks.

Immersion was the word I was trying to think of.

In fact I wish they would do the reverse. Immerse americans into spanish (or french) when they are in elementary school. I didn't take a foreign language until I was in high school and I struggled to learn it. They should have forced me to take another language in elementary school. Knowing spanish is so important where I live.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Dissident
yes that was an excellent post Sikander, thanks.

Immersion was the word I was trying to think of.

In fact I wish they would do the reverse. Immerse americans into spanish (or french) when they are in elementary school. I didn't take a foreign language until I was in high school and I struggled to learn it. They should have forced me to take another language in elementary school. Knowing spanish is so important where I live.

Yea, I took French in High School and it wasn't easy. I'm pretty good at languages, but without having the learning advantage of childhood or the discipline of adulthood I found French to be a difficult class.

[Q Classic]

That outcome is more a result of what parents do, not the schools. If parents continue to seak to their children in theirnative language they will retain understanding at least, if not full fluency. Tha state can do nothing about that, but for a child to succeed in the US they need to know english.

from what i've noticed with many of my friends...
it's not that they view the parent's language as "lower". it's that once they get more fluent in one language over the other, they use that one more often in a bid to gain a little measure of power over their parents.
that's why, if you'll note, when the parents get really angry, they'll drop any english that they know and switch to their home tongue... mainly because by that point, the kid won't be able to talk back in that language.

in my case, i can speak passable korean, and i can understand most of it. my brother can't speak a word of it, but he can understand enough of it. we speak a mixed korean-english thing at home and outside, but when mom gets angry or we get angry, the language situation becomes very polarized: she reverts entirely to korean, we tend to revert entirely into english.
this seems to also happen with several of my other c/j/k-american friends i know.

===

in regards to bilingual teaching, i think it's crap. immersion is the best way to teach any language: it immediately throws you into a do-or-die situation, and everybody will go for the do part, if they have enough support. bilingual education is not required for that.
stick the kids into regular, all-english classes, and if they need it, give them an esol class.
that's how i learned german and the little japanese i know: i was put in a situation where english was avoided, so that i had to learn the language.
bilingual education, much like bilingual forms and other bilingual government services, take away the need to learn the language.
get rid of them.

[Traianvs]

Originally posted by Pekka
Yeah it's true. We had a german teacher who had lived here for some years because she married a finnish guy. So, she comes and teaches german to us, but she can't really speak finnish. Like almost at all. Boy did we learn good. She tried to waiv her hands and speak english in the middle and her finnish that was horrible and the rest of the teaching was just in german, like we'd understand it because we're there to learn it. It was horrible. She was pissed all the time, because well it must have been frustrating, only thing she took it on us.

I'm all for tests and stuff. If you can't speak the language, then you can't really teach using that language, now can you?

That's different, if you learn a language at school the teacher is supposed to speak that particular language anyway... My French, English and German teachers never talked in Dutch to me; it helps because the more you talk and listen and communicate in that language the better really, it takes a longer time if you just translate everything all the time.. It's easier but not that effective!

So for me it's no problem that the teacher couldn't speak Finnish that well