Bilingual Ed

5 Pages 1354 Words

The Education of Non English Speaking Students in the U.S.
Growing up in a family where the dominant language spoken was Spanish, I remember feeling lost and separated from the kids at school who spoke mainly English. Even more so was trying to keep up in my academics when it was taught in a language I hardly understood or even worse, could speak. However, because of the close family I had at home, I remember being encouraged to learn the language as best I could because the idea remained that in order to succeed you must be able to effectively communicate in the English language. Albeit, I was a third generation American but the fact is culture is a important part of my families identity and even still today, Spanish is the dominant language spoken at my home. It wasn’t until around 3rd grade that my broken English became slightly understandable and I found myself excelling because I could understand and speak English better. For those first few years, I was enrolled in ESL or English as a Second Language classes. Enrolled in those classes were the worst because of the fact that kids would pick on us and we were seen as remedial students. It was in those days that I found myself determined to excel at English the best I could. For this, I was enthusiastic to write about education in America and how the debate between English only classes versus Bilingual Education has evolved.
For the past several decades, Bilingual Education has been an ongoing debate throughout the United States but mostly in the states where there has been a growing boom in the minority population, mainly the Hispanic community. So with the increase number of minorities, most of which are non English speakers, a need to develop an educational system that meets the needs of this non English speaking community is and has been lacking during these past few decades.
During these years, numerous systems have been tried and implemented, one of which is a practice of...