For families like ours, ensuring that children live in two languages is a necessity, not a luxury.
By Rey M. Rodríguez
Since writing “Won’t Your Spanish Hurt Their English?” for LA Language World last July, I have received dozens of responses from Los Angeles–area parents who shared my dismay over the shortage of Spanish language heritage schools in a city that is over 50 percent Latino and has so many Spanish speakers.
We know from many linguistic studies that the heritage language is essentially lost by the third generation. If we want to prevent that loss, we need to ensure that heritage language instruction is available for our children starting at a young age. For families like ours, living in two languages is a necessity, not a luxury. Along with knowing both languages comes a sense of identity and place in the world.
But our experience has taught us that developing heritage schools will take time, especially in a state that passed Proposition 227 in 1998, placing severe limitations on bilingual education in California’s public schools.
Like most Spanish-speaking parents in this metropolis, we are left crafting practical strategies for passing on Spanish to our boys, now enrolled in preschool and kindergarten, where English instruction predominates. Our plan so far is to expose our children to Spanish at home and take them to a weekend Spanish language heritage school.
But that won’t be enough, and we need to ask for our schools’ support. We think it's fair to ask them to develop after-school programs, focusing on literacy, to preserve the second languages of heritage speakers who learn all day in English. These classes could be taught in many languages in addition to Spanish.
One such program in Arlington, Va., was founded by George Mason University Professor Lisa Marie Rabin, who wondered why her daughter's many Spanish-speaking classmates were not being taught literacy and literature in their heritage language.
With the principal's blessing, George Mason Spanish majors began reading books, provided by the university and a local foundation, to students in grades one through four. Since then, these “book clubs” have developed into free after-school classes in Spanish literacy. A key to their success is the recognition that heritage language learners need a different type of instruction than children who learn Spanish only in the classroom.
What We're Up Against
This simple after-school model could be replicated in preschools and elementary schools in California. Although it requires few resources, it could promote the cognitive gains of learning another language, preserve the most critical links between children and their families, and broaden students' career opportunities.
So the proposed middle ground between no school involvement and a full component of bilingual programs is to increase the number of weekend Spanish language heritage schools and supplement them with after-school programs. In both cases, the decision to participate would be left to parents and their children.
To call it a “middle ground” is not to say that we should stop there. Ultimately, Californians need to expand the reach of dual immersion classrooms. Over 100 dual immersion schools in California already teach the standard curriculum in two languages, usually Spanish and English, but also in English and languages including Chinese and Korean. Two local examples of dual immersion programs are at the Foreign Language Academy in Glendale and Edison School in Santa Monica. The majority of these schools enroll an equal number of children who speak each language. The Spanish-English schools begin kindergarten with 90 percent of the curriculum in Spanish and each year increase the amount of English taught. The early focus on Spanish makes sense because of the exposure that all students have to English.
Moreover, the study plan raises the status of the Spanish-speaking kids, since the rest rely on them in class and to explain homework. As the balance between Spanish and English levels out, the advantages of this education remain evident, including high student achievement and membership in two linguistic communities.
By sixth grade, these children are ahead of their monolingual peers because they have been challenged to excel in two languages. They have also gained insight into who they are, both because they do not risk losing their ties with parents or grandparents and because they have become accomplished bilinguals.
The constant and debilitating attacks on bilingual education, the anti-affirmative-action movement symbolized by Proposition 209 and the anti-immigrant vitriol that English-Only advocates and others promote in a cynical era of "No Child Left Behind" all make for an unreceptive environment for increasing the number of dual immersion programs in the state. This resistance remains strong in spite of many successful dual language programs, both public and private, in this country and abroad.
I’m suggesting a challenge to that resistance. In a world city like Los Angeles, it makes no sense to be provincial. Instead of discouraging bilingualism, let’s create opportunities to promote it.
Rey M. Rodríguez, vice president of Business & Legal Affairs for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Distribution International, is a grateful son who hopes that he can pass on the gift of speaking at least two languages to his sons, just as his parents were able to do. All opinions expressed are solely his own.