Term Paper on "Tongue Tied the Lives of Multi Lingual Children in Public Education"

Term Paper 4 pages (1204 words) Sources: 1 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Tongue-Tied: The Lives of Multi-Lingual Children in Public Education

Santa Ana, Otto. (2004). Tongue-tied: The lives of multilingual children in public schools. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Tongue-tied: The lives of multilingual children in public schools edited by Otto Santa Ana is an anthology that takes a unique approach to cataloguing the different injustices suffered by multilingual children in the American school system. As its title suggests, the implication is that the current method of incorporating children who speak multiple or different languages other than English into the school community leaves such students tongue-tied, or unable to voice their true selves. It does not teach English effectively, or enable these students to truly realize their academic and personal potential.

One of the more interesting features of this work is the fact that it does not present its argument in the form of a singular or even multiple essays, but instead uses personal essays as well as data-based research to substantiate its claims. This is to break down conventional means of chronicling academic performance, and to illustrate the emotional costs of forcing children to choose between English and their home language and culture. The diverse personal narratives chronicle the often painful experiences of bilingual or bi and multicultural children within a system that does not understand their needs. Both essays and academic sources compiled within the text show how the process of language acquisition is never culturally neutral. Rather, the system's implied need for children to acquire a new language is often rooted in colonial or post-colonial motivations, and there is an assumption that English is not simply necessary, but is superior to that of the child's home language. Thus the act of speaking English becomes a way for the state to forcibly sever the child's connection to his or her home.

The difficulty in gaining a foothold in English because of improper instruction or negative experiences early on in life may mean that the bilingual child grows up with a distinct disadvantage to his or her peers that are often impossible to surmount, with devastating long-term socioeconomic consequences. Although the first and fourth sections of the book are anecdotal and personal, the other sections of the book statistically examine how bilingual and bicultural children's life chances are determined too early on, and their lack of initial fluency results in their being tracked into lower-level classes for the duration of their public school career. It suggests that the idea of 'immersion' is a fallacy, and advocates methods that incorporate either dual curricula, or immersion only certain sections of the day in conjunction with classes specifically targeted to ESL needs, particularly in subjects that require higher-level vocabulary, like science and math.

The scope of the research essays are more narrow than one might like, although they do address important issues such as the need to create more effective approaches to bilingual education, and evidence of how the current approach is detrimental to students' progress. The impressionistic and personal nature of the first-person sections, and the substantial portion of the book devoted to critical theory, or an analysis of how children of a postcolonial world are forced to speak in the oppressor's language to be understood means that the book is often more thought-provoking than a data-driven analysis that might be persuasive to a legislator who is, for example, debating whether to support the continuation of No Child Left Behind or other standardized testing approaches to measures school progress.

The impact of "No Child Left Behind," the thesis of the book implies is that by requiring students to meet standards that they cannot initially comply… READ MORE

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