Aria / Teaching Multilingual Children

Richard Rodriguez

Aria

Virginia Collier

Teaching Multilingual Children

Rodriguez argues that bilingualists simplistically scorn the value and necessity of assimilation. He believes they do not seem to realize that there are two ways a person is individualized, so they also don't realize that while one suffers a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality.

Collier argues that language is enchanting, powerful, magical, useful, personal, natural, and all-important. She thinks the reason to use this whole range of activities in the classroom is to eliminate boredom, raise awareness, and make language teaching well as learning as culturally relevant as possible for students. She hopes that the learning process will not only enrich the life of the student, but also that of his or her teacher.

Rather than taking direct quotes I thought about doing it as a whole. These two articles offer very different perspectives about second language speakers. The first article was much easier to read. He describes his early schooling as an Hispanic student in an English-speaking Catholic School. His conclusion made me feel sad for him, but i know by his closing thought, that was not his intent. He writes about the result of the nuns visiting his parents and telling him to speak English in their home: "The silence at home, however, was finally more than a literal silence. Fewer words passed between parent and child, but more profound was the silence that resulted from my inattention to sounds of English in public." He goes on to say: "I would have been happier about my public success had i not sometimes recalled what it had been like earlier, when my family had conveyed in intimacy through a set of conveniently private sounds. Sometimes in public, hearing a stranger, I'd hark back to my past." As an ESL student, he felt cheated at home because of the pressure the nuns put on his parents to speak English. He is not totally against what they did to him, which is surprising to me. He feels like it helped him to assimilate into society. It makes me think.

The nest article, "Teaching Multilingual Children was much more factual. I learned a couple of things when reading this article. The first thing I learned from the article was about the two kinds of language ESL students need to learn.The author talks about learning casual language for conversation. In addition, however, they talk about Academic language: the language of learning in schools. They explain the difference: "The critical distinction to maintain is between how children acquire the capacity to converse causally in a second language, and how they learn to become proficient students using second language. These are two entirely different progresses." I think i am observing this in my placement in Central Falls. I am observing a first grade ESL class and a fifth grade ESL class. There are new speakers in both classes, but the fifth graders need a lot more support because the academic language is so much more difficult.

Collier goes on to describe the idea way for ESL students to become literate. She states: "The more successful long-term academic achievement occurs when the students' primary language is the initial language of literacy. First at the initial stage of instruction, using the home language for literacy builds the self-worth of language minority students. Further, literacy research states that first language literacy favorably influences subsequent second language settings." This is interesting to me because in school where I am observing almost 25% of the population are ESL students, and there is no instruction taking place in Spanish. When I think about the first article, I don't think Rodriguez would have a problem with this.