SRTOL

Students are entitled to a right to their own language, but what if that right serves as a negative impact? I—student, peer, and Hispanic—have seen a lot of situations where SRTOL actually has had a negative impact. A lot of the literature that involves language rights often focuses too much on case studies that emphasizes more or less on the rights that are either granted, or denied in a dominant speech community. Students have a right to their own language, but sometimes people can be denied that right because of an accent. The English language has a variety of accents, and sometimes people can be considered less intelligent for using those accents. Students have a right to their own language. There are many publications out there that focus

Teachers aren’t entirely at fault, many documents out there focus on immigrants and how they have rights, but they don’t often go into depth about language rights. Teachers feel like its better to send children who don’t understand English very well to special education rather than ELL, they are denying them their SRTOL and pushing it under the rug, but how does that make them feel? From my personal experience I can say that being held back a year was the worst thing in my education, not only was I denied my language, but I was robbed a year of my life. My language doesn’t measure intelligence, I understand what I am doing, and I can explain it very well in Spanish. During that time, I could explain it well in Spanish, maybe not in English, but I knew what I was doing and I felt as if I was less intelligent because of the language I spoke. Did teachers even think about what they were doing? What could come from this? Obviously not. If teachers followed, taught, or even preached SRTOL, I wouldn’t have been robbed a year, I would have felt intelligent when I was younger, I would be done with school a year sooner. ELL is a good alternative than special education, we should have ELL classes in abundance, this would cause students to feel more capable and have them succeed even further, without having them to be held back a year. When teachers are educated in SRTOL… there will be no negative in