Amazon sponsors numerous discussion threads, one of the most popular of which is entitled, "Obama says longer school days and years will bring the US up to par" which, as I write, has 3,535 entries in a little over two years.
Occasionally, I'll post some observations or criticisms. Someone named Eliseo Ramirez posted an essay yesterday. The essay appeared as one undifferentiated block of text; I have put it into paragraph form. Although Ramirez is clearly opposed to English's rules of capitalization, I am not going to assume that he is an opponent of paragraphing. But even if he is, I have my readers to consider.
By Eliseo Ramirez
non speaking English students or bilingual students are not the problem, ignorance and a failure to change our teaching methods is the issue. this is really an issue that needs deep understanding and i am thankful that i took my bilingual education course with dr. leo gomez who is very involved in reforming education. please everyone check out this website (http://dlti.us/first.html)for a better understanding of the issue. but i will brief you vaguely on the issue.
studies have shown that a student brought up in a dual language education (k-12) will be cognitively superior on all levels and subjects when compared to all english students, ESL, early exit and late exit transitional programs which intend to assimilate or eliminate the native language of the student and replace it with English.
when thinking of the term bilingual education, most educators do not fully understand the term or definition. a bilingual educators purpose is to teach academic content despite the students native language. for example, whether you teach mathematics in english or russian, the number values or concept remain the same across the languages. this also applies to all subjects taught, the academic content remains the same.
instead most educators have a sink or swim philosophy and label the children as the issue if they are not picking up English well enough. if the students do not cognitively understand something, it is not because they are mentally deficient, it is because our teaching methods have not allowed the student to grow from Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills such as pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar into the second level of learning which is Cognitive/Academic Language Proficiency such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation which are context reduced.
the threshold theory of a bilingual education tells us that there are three levels of learning. at the first level, the student is underdeveloped in both languages. at this level the student is relatively young and commencing his school education so this is understandable. by the second threshold of bilingual education, the student is proficient in at least one language which anchors or propels the students underdeveloped language to reach the level of proficiency as the strong language. having this balance in proficiency in two languages will allow the student to reach the third threshold with a higher level of cognitivity and intelligence across all subjects as studies have shown.
educators are so bent on "assimilating" all students into English, when in actuality we live in an ever growing globalized world in which ppl benefit from knowing more than one language. for example, with ESL, early exit, late exit transitional programs, we are promoting eliminating any language other than English, yet in high school we require students to take a foreign language. pretty ignorant i would say. we need to stop living in a modern detrimental era of seeing anything other than English as a bad thing, and start living more in the additive period, where a second language has been shown to have cognitive advantages and promotes a higher intelligence.
in the detrimental era educators believed in a Separate Underlying Proficiency which stated that languages were separate parts of brain not connected and that as one grew more, the other language would shrink due to a finite amount of space in the brain. studies later looked to a Common Underlying Proficiency which states that there is a central operating system in which there is an infinite amount of space for more than one language to grow. Being able to proficiently code switch in between languages is what has shown the higher levels of coginitivity and proficiency across all languages.
I know i must sound like some know it all trying to show ppl up. i am not. i am simply an undergrad studying to be a bilingual interdisciplinary studies major who happened to have experienced all of which i speak due to the area i grew up in and being a bilingual myself. please ppl and educators, we need to examine ourselves before we place the blame the students. it is our duty to fix this problem. if you dont care to acknowledge this issue with bilingual students, then you should resign as you are only contributing to the misconception of bilingual students or non English students being the issue.
By Nicholas Stix
"Sink or swim" is typical bilingualspeak. The only people I ever hear use that phrase are proponents of so-called bilingualism, who are opposed to Hispanic children learning English. Likewise, for the notion that there are "programs which intend to assimilate or eliminate the native language of the student and replace it with English." I'm not aware of any such programs, outside of the fevered imaginings of Reconquistas, who work from a zero-sum mentality: Kids can learn English or Spanish, but not both. (Yes, I know that Eliseo Ramirez delivered a disquisition on brain theory. That was meant to serve as a distraction. Besides, according to his theory, it would be impossible for the learning of English to eliminate someone's knowledge of another language, even if they weren't going home to their Spanish-speaking parents and relatives.)
"studies have shown that a student brought up in a dual language education (k-12) will be cognitively superior on all levels and subjects when compared to all english students…" What studies? Where?
During the mid-to-late 1990s, I did a good deal of research on so-called bilingual education, which proved to be the greatest method ever devised to arrest language acquisition. A major study conducted by the New York City Board of Education (see below) showed that school children who were subjected to BE had their education destroyed.
"when in actuality we live in an ever growing globalized world in which ppl benefit from knowing more than one language." This is edspeak. The language of the global marketplace is English. Why do you oppose teaching Hispanic children English?
The only sense in which an ordinary American citizen lives "in an ever growing globalized world," is if his boss ships his job abroad, or his and his family's quality of life is destroyed, and their rights violated, due to employers and politicians flooding his country with immigrants and illegal aliens. How will knowing a foreign language help the newly unemployed American? It won't even get him a job serving illegal aliens in a McDonald's, since the manager will discriminate against him.
"Research"?: As I wrote 11 years ago,
The education subculture is dominated by so-called fugitive and “shadow” research, which is circulated among ideologues -- often privately -- and secretly imposed at the district level by highly paid, racist (antiwhite) diversity consultants, at taxpayers’ expense.
In her 1999 book, Losing Our Language, Sandra Stotsky revealed how, in advocating for a dubious pedagogical practice, a multicultural professor of education routinely will refer to research supporting his or her position. The typically unsubstantiated supporting research will consist of editorializing and references to yet more articles lacking factual support.
Eliseo Ramirez is using the same phony, unsupported slogans that Reconquistas and other Marxists have been using for a generation.
In another 2000 article I wrote,
According to BE activists' initial public pronouncements, students would begin by spending equal amounts of class time using their "primary" (i.e., their parents') language and English. After two or three years, they would be mainstreamed into classes that were taught primarily or exclusively in English. In practice, however, BE students have spent 80-100 percent of their time learning in a foreign language, often for their entire school careers. But you can only learn English through English!
For scholarly evidence of "two-way's" efficacy, Department of Education (DOE) spokeswoman Melinda Ulloa referred me to the Washington, DC-based Center for Applied Linguistics (www.cal.org). While aggressively supporting BE, "CAL" provides no proof that it works.
Rosalie Pedalino Porter, the founder and former president of the Washington, DC-based READ (Research in English Acquisition & Development) Institute, and a national authority on bilingualism, told me Secretary Riley's plan is "not a bad idea for an experiment, but it should not be promoted wholesale. He shouldn't pretend to parents that this is a proved, successful method that is going to work for immigrant children. I don't know of a school yet, that documented a dual immersion [BE] program in which all children learned both languages."
All available evidence shows that, rather than producing "bilinguals," BE produces "non-linguals" who are not fluent in any language.
From 1990-94, New York City's pro-BE Board of Education conducted a longitudinal study of three-year exit rates into normal English classes for "limited English proficiency" (LEP) children. Children placed in ESL classes had a 54 to 373.9 percent higher success rate, respectively, than peers who were placed in BE classes. Children placed in ESL in kindergarten had a 54 percent higher success rate than peers placed in BE; second-graders had a 205.4 higher success rate; and sixth-graders had a 373.9 higher success rate.
In a sworn affidavit published in the anthology, The Failure of Bilingual Education, retired Brooklyn assistant high school principal Edwin Selzer testified that, "once a child was in a bilingual education program, he ... was never mainstreamed into regular English-speaking classes." Selzer reported, too, that "many students graduating from Eastern District High School were illiterate in both Spanish and English."
CAL, which would have all children spend at least six years in a "bilingual" environment, calls its preferred BE method "90-10," as in 90 percent Spanish, and ten percent English. That's a novel way of redefining, "two-way."
DOE spokeswoman Melinda Ulloa told me, "the Secretary is referring to one approach not just for immigrant children, but for native-born children." Ulloa also noted, "research and studies show that the earlier you acquire a language, the better." In other words, the Secretary of Education and CAL are looking to extend a method that has been proven to retard Hispanic children's linguistic and intellectual development, to all public school children.
Bilingual activists apparently subscribe to the political philosophy whereby in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Ramirez: it is our duty to fix this problem. if you dont care to acknowledge this issue with bilingual students, then you should resign as you are only contributing to the misconception of bilingual students or non English students being the issue.
What problem? What duty? But I get the "resign" part: 'If you're not a Reconquista, you are guilty of injecting truth and morality into education, and should resign, so that yet another white American patriot can be destroyed, and a Reconquista can have your paycheck, and teach your students to hate America, violently defy her laws and language, steal your country, and impose Hispanic supremacy.'
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