Arizona Immigration and Education
April 30th, 2010 | View Comments
A blogger for the Wall Street Journal has written a post commenting on the impact the immigration law may have on education.
The new law requires police to question anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. The educational implication for this may result in the arbitrary firing of teachers with heavy accents or have less than standard English syntax or morphology.
The reasoning given behind this is, “How can you expect a student learning English to learn it properly from someone who has trouble with the language himself or herself? Whether it be through clarity of pronunciation, mixing syntax and morphology, or otherwise ‘mangling’ the language?”
The question at the core is how to deem one person more “American” than the next, using linguistics as a tool. I know many children who are US born to immigrant parents who speak with accented English and have less than perfect syntax because they learned English simultaneously as their native tongue. Others have become naturalized citizens, are hard-working professionals, who just happen to have accents as English was not their first language. Though they are US Citizens, this new law could potentially threaten the employment of Arizona teachers in these situations.
First, nobody speaks “perfect” English. We all use slang, mix tenses, leave prepositions at the end of sentences, etc. If grammar and spelling were markers for teaching employment, a large majority of teachers would find themselves with pink slips. (I was in a classroom today where the teacher had written “grammer” on the board.) Or what about the many students (and teachers) who consistently mix up “there”, “their”, and “they’re”? Or those who write, “should of” instead of “should have”? Should those individuals be interrogated too?
Second, what about regional accents? There are many accents within our nation that people from outside that geographic region find difficult to understand. Fran Drescher’s New York accent? Or what about a heavy Southern drawl? Or the nasal accent associated with “Wes-caaaahn-sin”?
While I understand why this law was passed and the intention behind it, the whole thing just seems poorly thought out. I suspect it will affect many people in ways that its writers had not previously thought.
Peter posted this on April 30th, 2010 @ 8:46pm in Grammar, Language Education, Multilingualism | Permalink to "Arizona Immigration and Education"
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