Bilingual Education In Language Analysis

How important is bilingual education and its benefits for immigrant students? Lack of Bilingual Education has been a problem for immigrant students for decades, affecting immigrant students from the 1800s up to now causing major problems in families. As for Richard Rodriguez, in the article "An Education in Language" the author Richard Rodriguez presents his own personal experience how difficult it is to keep a family together when the native language is not spoken at home. He shows examples of his life while growing up, and how he disconnected from his family and connected to his teachers. In addition, he discusses the different views his parents had regarding higher education. He also describes how he became isolated from his family as he

If the teachers had been more understanding about Rodriguez 's language problem, they could have solved the problem more efficiently and easily. Instead of pushing him and his family to abandon their native language and only communicate in English, they should have come up with different and easy methods to make Rodriguez understand English easily like by encouraging him to talk with his classmates in English, and showing different diagrams could have helped a lot. His teachers should have encouraged his parents to maintain both languages. According to the article "Bilingualism: When Education and Assimilation Clash" experts say that students speaking their native languages don 't have any difficulties or problems in their mastery of the English language, and surprisingly they say it is advantageous to the students. In a related example, I had a cousin who came to America in his early childhood. He faced many problems similar to Rodriguez’s but his teachers were very thoughtful. They helped him by encouraging his parents to speak their native language at home, and showing him simple picture books, and they had after class programs to help immigrant students

Another reason this solution would have not worked is that because Rodriguez was already adopting the American culture and his academic success blinded him from the more important things of his life. Rodriguez cites, “Increasingly successful in class, I would have come home a troubled son, aware education was making me different from my parents.” (2). This shows Rodriguez’s academic success had made him think differently that led to losing his heritage. That is why this solution seemed a bit unrealistic at that moment and could not help Rodriguez and his family that much. Generally speaking, the problems Rodriguez faced were very bad. If the teachers had been more considerate and thoughtful about the difficulties he was facing it would have been avoided easily and efficiently, because your cultural identity and native language are the ones that tell who you are. Bilingual education has been a debate for a long time now causing major issues in families and students. This issue should have been solved by now. Schools should support bilingual education and encourage their immigrant students to continue speaking their native language to prevent this