On January 2, 2008 the Austin Independent School District (AISD) announced that they intended to restart a bilingual immersion program that had been tested in 2003 but was shut down due to budget issues and concerns from some people in the community that kids weren’t performing well in English and that they were at risk of being illiterate in both English and Spanish due to a lack of emphasis on either language. This last objection is something that has become an urban legend even though well conducted and scientifically valid research studies have proven that after an initial delay in mastery of both languages compared to how a kid would perform with a single language, bilingual kids actually perform as well or better than monolingual kids in standardized tests that test for the mastery of the single common language.
This myth of kids becoming illiterate in both languages if they are taught bilingually is commonly used by naysayers of bilingual education and is something that troubles me. As a proof point of how this notion is absurd I can offer myself as well as most, if not all, of my fellow alumni that graduated from the American High School in Mexico City, a full immersion bilingual school. All of us are not only fully fluent in reading, writing, and speaking both languages and, in my case at least, outperformed most English-only kids when we arrived in college in the US and took English 101! In my case I recall my first few days of English 101 and being shocked at how bad the English composition skills were among most (not all) of my classmates who were English-only speakers. To be fair here, though, one must be very careful on what is meant by “bilingual education”. As it relates to Austin Bilingue, bilingual education means teaching kids so they can obtain mastery of both languages. In many other circles, however, bilingual education means teaching non-English speakers in their native language until the point that they can achieve fluency in English and enter the mainline English-only curriculum. But more on this topic later…
Anyway, I applaud AIDS’ efforts. Read the article and let me know what you think!
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