The United States, a melting point of ethnicities, was founded as a nation of diverse populations coming together for one central goal: freedom. Years later and the definition of freedom has been distorted and altered. The country has seen racial and gender oppression of many sorts, from Native American residents to Mexican immigrants, that still continues in many ways today. With a surplus of ethnicities, there lie a surplus of cultures. These cultures represent themselves with different traditions, customs, and languages. The nation is growing with the number of immigrants and thus, increasing the use of vernaculars other than English. The U.S. Census Bureau Reports at least 350 languages are spoken in U.S. homes (Census Bureau Report,
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Research on the social factors related to bilingualism help to understand the monolingual ideology’s effect on bilinguals. Through both examining the policy and education in the United States, the underlying monolingual ideology can be examined through the use of examples of uses of multiple languages and only English to portray the perception society has of bilinguals and the arguments for monolingual acts, legislations, and the English Only Movement which will give evidence for bilingual education demonstrating the basis for the monolingual ideology. Finally, I will tie in the research with factors of social and political status and the use of languages in education in today’s culture of political change to show the underlying monolingual ideology in …show more content…
“By the time I was a teenager, I spoke the language at the level of a second grader. My English was perfect, but in Spanish I was a nincompoop.” (Tobar 2016) He never took a class in Spanish literature or grammar like the English equivalent, but instead was force into a monolingual world. The debate on the implementation of bilingual education is more than just California Proposition 58. It has developed overtime and has only grown with importance and heated arguments. “The strongest arguments against bilingual education came from two employees of the U.S. Department of Education, Keith Baker and Adriane de Kanter (1981, 1983), who reviewed the bilingual education evaluation literature and concluded that bilingual education was not effective in meeting the educational needs of language-minority children. Baker and de Kanter 's report "is easily the most quoted federal pronouncement on the education of [Limited-English-proficient] children in the 1980s, and probably the most criticized as well" (Crawford, 1989, p. 94).” (English Only Movement…) Supporters of the monolingual educational implementation promote the usage of teaching English through only the use of English, not a bilingual
Research on the social factors related to bilingualism help to understand the monolingual ideology’s effect on bilinguals. Through both examining the policy and education in the United States, the underlying monolingual ideology can be examined through the use of examples of uses of multiple languages and only English to portray the perception society has of bilinguals and the arguments for monolingual acts, legislations, and the English Only Movement which will give evidence for bilingual education demonstrating the basis for the monolingual ideology. Finally, I will tie in the research with factors of social and political status and the use of languages in education in today’s culture of political change to show the underlying monolingual ideology in …show more content…
“By the time I was a teenager, I spoke the language at the level of a second grader. My English was perfect, but in Spanish I was a nincompoop.” (Tobar 2016) He never took a class in Spanish literature or grammar like the English equivalent, but instead was force into a monolingual world. The debate on the implementation of bilingual education is more than just California Proposition 58. It has developed overtime and has only grown with importance and heated arguments. “The strongest arguments against bilingual education came from two employees of the U.S. Department of Education, Keith Baker and Adriane de Kanter (1981, 1983), who reviewed the bilingual education evaluation literature and concluded that bilingual education was not effective in meeting the educational needs of language-minority children. Baker and de Kanter 's report "is easily the most quoted federal pronouncement on the education of [Limited-English-proficient] children in the 1980s, and probably the most criticized as well" (Crawford, 1989, p. 94).” (English Only Movement…) Supporters of the monolingual educational implementation promote the usage of teaching English through only the use of English, not a bilingual