Caroline Calais -- Democracy in Americas

Get rid of bilingual education – please. Here in Texas, 60 percent of all high school students that have been classified with having limited English proficiency (LEP), have been attending U.S schools for five years or more. Experts thinks the reason to LEP is that students have gotten poor bilingual- or English as a second language instruction in earlier grades, or that they often are forced to change schools when their family move around. I think we should look at bilingual education in itself as the source. Reports done in New York  conclude that children qualified more rapidly for mainstream classes if they came from English as a second language program, than they did when they came from bilingual one.

“All things being equal, use of native language in education is positive, but a slight positive”, says Kenji Hakuta education professor at Stanford University. “They pretty much learn it at the same pace. It’s partly because we underestimate the amount of exposure kids get to English from television, older brothers and sisters, and even friends on the playground”.

I think we all benefit from strong cognitive academic instruction in our first language, I just don’t think that first language must be equal with native language. It is not that I don’t appreciate the benefits knowledge of languages give. I am multilingual, speaking Swedish, English and Spanish fluently, and know how much easier it is to understand a people -- a culture -- if you speak the language. But I also know that if you don’t start with one language and learn it well in school, it inhibits your thinking.

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“We moved around a lot”, says Mr. Wennerström, a Swedish expat. “And my children spoke several languages, still I decided to send them to finish up their education in Sweden. I realized that they needed one language in which they could think -- have the capacity to think in complicated terms”.

I recognize that. I have had most of my schooling in Sweden, and even though I left the country 16 years ago I still use Swedish when I have to figure out complicated correlations of some kind.  And that is why I think first language is the language people speak around you in the country where you grow up; use in school, in business life – not necessarily your native language.