English immersion is better is completely off-base. Please point me to research that supports English immersion. Meanwhile here is a ton of info that supports bilingual education in teaching English. And if you support after school native language tutoring then you must believe in bilingual education unless you have some hang-up with the fact that some children need to learn cognitive academic skills in the native language to be able appropriately apply them in the second language.
http://www.irvingisd.net/~spollard/research.htmAnd here is an op-ed I wrote.
The Results: Bilingual Education Means Better English
If only that were what polls tell us about bilingual education. To believe most polls would be to believe that bilingual education is more reviled than most aspects of American life and it certainly doesn’t mean better English. There are some exceptions such as a poll done in Texas by the Office of Survey Research at the University of Texas in June, 1998, that shows that 72% of the respondents find bilingual education an important part of the academic process for some students. With the exception of these precious few, do polls really show such aversion for bilingual education or do the polls strike another chord with the respondent? I must side with the latter. Allow me to explain.
What most polls on bilingual education actually show is the overriding support that English has in the United States. The polls show that English is considered to be the language of the land. The respondents believe that English is exceedingly important in order for anyone to be successful in an academic as well as in a commercial setting. I agree with this. In fact, there is no bilingual educator or bilingual supporter that would not agree with this also. The anti-bilingual movement knows this and it uses these strong feelings for the English language to gain a political and cultural advantage.
Many groups, including the English Only movement, manipulate their questions to solicit the response they desire. David Moore, vice president of the Gallup Poll states in Media Beat magazine, “Slight differences in question wording, or in the placement of the questions in the interview, can have profound consequences…” He goes on to say that the poll findings “…are very much influenced by the polling process itself.” In fact, author Herbert Schiller in the same article says that opinion polling is “a choice-restriciting mechanism.” I concur. The English Only movement knows that a question that seems to pit English against Spanish will always cause a response in favor of English and mistakenly against bilingual education.
The organization, Public Agenda, polls respondents on a variety of issues and it recognizes that sometimes the results may be less than reliable. The guidelines for recognizing a possibly flawed poll are:
* Results change when survey questions are reworded slightly
* Results change when implications or trade-offs of a policy are pointed out.
* Results may be misleading if reported in isolation or out of context
* Other research suggests that people have incomplete or inaccurate knowledge in this area.
These guidelines could apply to just about every poll that I have seen on bilingual education especially the last guideline. Public Agenda didn’t follow its own guidelines when it solicited the opinion of the public as to in which language immigrants should be taught. The question read in part, “…public schools should teach immigrants in their native language only until they know enough English to join regular classes…” First the majority of respondents know nothing of bilingual education, see the fourth guideline. Secondly, this statement is misleading. The word, only, leads some to believe that children are taught exclusively in the native language until they learn English. No, this is not true. English is taught on a daily basis. We teach in the native language to make input in English comprehensible. This statement might be flawed but I don’t think that Public Agenda set out to mislead the public. However, some organizations will take these polls to mean that there is ground-swelling support for the abolition of bilingual education when, in reality, people are giving their opinion on a subject of which they know next to nothing. In the case of bilingual education, the respondents will most consistently vote on the side of English with that language being the most familiar to them.
In truth, there are no sides. Bilingual education is on the side of English. We bilingual teachers sometimes refer to bilingual education as B.E. It is most fitting that it could also stand for, Better English because bilingual education does give a child the opportunity to communicate with more comprehension and function with higher degrees of success academically in English and as a great secondary benefit, the child can do the same in Spanish! Much of the United States has to become more cognizant of what bilingual education is or perhaps more importantly what it is not.
The truth is out there, but it is not in the polls. Talk to bilingual teachers, visit classrooms, go to libraries and do the research if you are so inclined, but don’t let polls form your opinion. Formulate one on your own and I think that you will see that bilingual education is not what many think it is. It is the best way to teach a child English while still giving that child an opportunity to be successful in the classroom. As a country, we need to ask ourselves if we want to teach some children to speak English or to teach children to speak English and then know what to do with it. Bilingual education, since it maintains and develops literacy, affords the child the luxury of knowing what to do with his second language. Too many respondents in polls do not realize this and with the simple answer of yes or no in a poll, one more child loses the opportunity to learn how to learn.