4/11/08: Bilingual education leads to higher scores

When I was 10, my best friend was a Vietnamese immigrant named Van. She had been in America less than a year and transferred to my class at Northend Elementary in New Britain from Cromwell in the middle of the year. I was assigned to tutor her, and we became fast friends.

Our friendship grew despite the limitations of Van's English, which was broken and accented, and my Vietnamese, which was nonexistent. As she became more fluent, I became less so, altering my grammar and accent to match hers so she could understand me more easily. I probably looked pretty strange to outsiders, a little white girl running around speaking like a recent Asian immigrant.

But great friendships always look strange to outsiders, and this was a great friendship.

Over the next few years, I watched and listened as Van's English improved, and as she told me about her "special" classes in English as a Second Language, for which she was removed from regular middle school classes once a day. Her teacher, like most ESL teachers in America, had not been specifically trained to teach ESL and made do with innate creativity and what resources he could find. He must have worked with learners from several language groups; now having been an ESL teacher myself, I imagine he was hard-pressed to come up with lessons that dealt with the specific difficulties encountered by Polish speakers learning English while also attending to Lao or Spanish or Arabic speakers' needs.

Van worked hard, but even as a middle-schooler, I felt there must be a better way.

There is.

It's called bilingual education.

If Van and I had been offered bilingual education in, for example, Vietnamese and English, not only would she more quickly have learned English -- and content-based subjects such as science or math -- but I would also have been able to learn her language.

Vietnamese may not have the cultural cache of French of the economic clout of Chinese, and I'm not arguing that central Connecticut needs an English-Vietnamese bilingual magnet school. But learning any language in addition to our mother tongues expands our minds and helps us to think through problems from multiple perspectives.

And learning through bilingual education is the most effective way.

If scientific research will impress, consider that according to a major study released by the U.S. Department of Education in 1991, "the more schools developed children's native-language skills, the higher they scored academically over the long term in English." In Dade County, Fla., research completed in 2000 showed students enrolled in bilingual education scored higher in literacy than those in English immersion programs.

Common sense bears this out. Imagine being taken to a non-English-speaking country and put into a classroom with peers, then being expected to follow instructions, learn new material and make friends. Even with all your adult knowledge at your disposal, this task would be nearly impossible, and you would likely feel alienated and alone.

Now imagine that half your fellow students spoke your language, that the other half were learning it and that many of your classes would be held in your mother tongue. Learning would become cooperative and fun.

Teaching kids in their first language leads them to greater success in the long term; so does having them learn a second language. If bilingual education offers us the opportunity to do both effectively, why wouldn't we take advantage of that?

I was lucky. Even without bilingual education, I learned to love language and respect other cultures through my friend.

For the new generation, let's not rely on luck.