Posted by
Steve on Thursday, September 01, 2011 12:56:01 PM
English is the language of the United States. That is, the language you use if you want to get ahead. If all you want to do is survive, you can speak just about anything. But, you have to pay the consequences of not speaking English and take the low wages and poor living conditions. That is how it has been since the United States was founded in 1776.
Now, you may criticize and say that my family has spoken English our entire lives and we do not understand. That is partially true. My father’s family has spoken the most current version of English for as long as there has been English. My mother’s family on the other hand had to deal with the decision to speak their native tongue in America or English. They chose English.
My mother’s mother came here from Norway when she was about 12 or 13. My mother’s father came here from Sweden when he was 17 or 18. Both spoke their native tongues fluently and English poorly when they got married. So, at home they spoke Norwegian. Norwegian and Swedish are so similar that if you speak one the other can understand. The difference is primarily in how they are written. My mother was the oldest child. Her parents used Norwegian as their language to use when they did not want her to know what they were saying. That worked until one day my mother responded in Norwegian. From that day forward, not a single word of Norwegian was used in the house. As a result, my mother spoke English. Now, I regret the loss of Norwegian as a family language, but I understand their reasoning. They wanted their daughter to have the greatest opportunity possible in the United States. They did not want language to be a barrier.
I teach at a community college with a lot of Hispanic students from various countries. Many times I have talked to them about how they are raising their children. I use my grandparents as an example of one way to do it. I also say that they should not lose the Spanish. Some are teaching their children Spanish exclusively at home. They say that they can learn English when they reach school. Others speak both English and Spanish in the home. My personal opinion is that speaking both languages helps the child learn both languages. One family had the father who was trying to learn Spanish and the mother trying to learn English. They decided that in the home, he would only speak Spanish and she would only speak English. That way they practiced their weak language and taught their child both. I thought that was a great solution to the problem. I had another friend that knew Japanese. They had Japanese day once each week where they only language spoken in the house that day was Japanese.
I think that when we make excuses for students and say they need to speak fractured English or another language instead of English, we are dooming them to a lower class life. If I was an employer and three people were coming in to interview for a position. One could speak only fractured English. One could only speak Spanish and one could speak proper English. I would hire the one that could speak proper English. That person would have shown that they had a good education and would be more likely to succeed in the position.
There is some controversy over who should be teaching English to our students. One group says that the teachers should be completely proficient in English with no fractured context. The other group says that the requirement for proper English is racially discriminatory. There is nothing racial about it. Anyone can learn to speak proper English. It is just a matter of being taught proper English by someone who knows what they are doing. One of the best English speakers on the planet is James Earl Jones. He is a black man. If he can speak proper English, any black person can speak proper English. The same goes for Hispanics. I had a great friend, Richard Lara, who spoke better English than I do. He was Hispanic and spoke only Spanish until he started school. People who make excuses for poor learning and teaching are just trying to lower the bar so everyone passes. We should raise the bar so only the best are rewarded.