An Interesting Debate on English Education at NYTimes.com
March 11th, 2009 | View Comments
Just a quick heads up: it looks like the NY Times has begun hosting a debate on immigration, and is starting with how to teach young children English.
We’ve talked about English education a lot here, but mostly in the context of English as the lingua franca. Learning a country’s dominant language (and I certainly don’t just mean the US here) as an immigrant–or the child-citizen of immigrants–is very different with a very different set of issues, and I’m not sure where I stand on many of them.
Apparently, a feature article on “a Virginia school district that segregates students who are the children of immigrants, and who don’t speak English well, to make it easier to give them intensive support” will be published this weekend. Possibly, this will help clarify my own views; either way, I suspect I’ll post afterwards with my reactions. But, in the meantime, I found the related debate to be fascinating, and encourage people to check it out.
Update: Article now available. Started and restarted multiple drafts of my response–this may take awhile.
Elenita posted this on March 11th, 2009 @ 11:36am in English, Language Education, Multilingualism | Permalink to "An Interesting Debate on English Education at NYTimes.com"
American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
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Korean-American girl who blogs under a Spanish pseudonym because being culturally confusing is fun. Native speakers say that she has outstanding Spanish (which is a definite compliment) and outstanding German (which is most assuredly not).
Elenita
American-born, Taiwanese guy who took five semesters worth of German and ended up with a major in Linguistics.
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I did read that article and it’s interesting and balanced. Many of the comments however show a limited understanding of the difference between fact and opinion.