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AS A foreign language teacher I could hardly have found a better subject than the one proposed by Richard Brod. I am twenty years too young to speak from firsthand knowledge of the first hundred years of the MLA, but lucky experience during the eighty years I have been granted has given me a certain perspective, perhaps a better perspective on the next hundred years than on the past century.
I am a man—an old man—whose eighty-one years have been largely devoted to learning languages and absorbing cultures and who has given more than fifty years of his life to the teaching or promotion of foreign language education and bilingual schooling.
Now at the end of a long career I am filled with disappointments, both personal and professional; but I still nourish the hope that the young women and men who follow us will succeed better than we have.
Here are a few of my disappointments as a language learner:
Now let me confess some of my frustrations as a teacher and promoter of foreign languages and cultures and of bilingual education.
That I am not alone in being dissatisfied with my education is indicated by the spate of critical reports on American education that has come out of late. And one can hardly pick up a newspaper or magazine without finding an article critical of bilingual education. Just the other day I received in the mail a letter from former Senator S. I. Hayakawa inviting me to contribute toward his campaign “to restore English to its rightful place as the language of all Americans.” What a straw man he sets up. No one that I know of questions the national, quasi-official status of English in the United States or the need of all future citizens to master it. Hayakawa thinks that we “have unwisely embarked upon a policy of so-called ‘bilingualism,’ putting foreign languages in competition with our own.”
Let me next turn to the popular book Hunger of Memory , by Richard Rodríguez. Having painfully turned his back on his native Spanish and his family's Mexican-American cultural heritage, he made good in English, identified with his Anglo teachers, and ultimately achieved distinction as a writer and lecturer. In writing his autobiography he felt called on to condemn bilingual education and affirmative action, which he seems not to understand. The best review of this book to appear so far is in my opinion that of Carlos Hortas of Hunter College. Hortas feels that Rodríguez, in sacrificing his language and culture for the sake of a “public identity,” pays too high a price, and I agree. Let me quote Hortas's final paragraph:
Although he dedicates his book to his parents, “for her and for him—to honor them,” Richard Rodríguez has really written a book for his Anglo readers. Otherwise he would have dedicated his book to mamá and papá, and thereby honored them not by these very words but by the message of intimacy and love that would have passed through them.
(359)
By way of contrast let me cite the case of a Korean family. A young Korean youth minister in Arlington, Virginia, decided to study for a doctorate at Georgetown University. He was lucky enough to come under the direction of Robert Lado, who encouraged him to conduct a preschool biliteracy study using the elder of his two daughters as a subject. The Reverend Ok Ro Lee made a rule that only Korean was to be used in the family and that his two daughters were to learn English outside the home. Periodically Ok Ro Lee would ask his daughter Yuha why she should learn both Korean and English well. The expected answer was: “Because I am a Korean living in the United States.” One day Yuha said proudly to one of her father's friends at Georgetown, “I have two speaks. Do you know the English sun in Korean?” She was very proud that she had two “speaks” and wanted to show off her bilingual ability. In so doing she also showed that she had a positive selfimage. Yuha was well on her way to reading in English by the time she entered kindergarten. Since learning to read a second language is a matter of easy transfer, Yuha learned with the help of a Korean teacher to read Korean in the six weeks between kindergarten and first grade. When she entered first grade, she was not only bilingual: she was biliterate and bicultural. If we in the United States were really serious about bilingual education, about preserving our enormous resources of languages and cultures, we would help our children maintain their home languages in school long enough to acquire literacy in them, after which it would be easy to become literate in English.
It happens that I know from personal experience how easy it is for an infant to learn a language and indeed a second language. All one has to do is hear them. My parents were both immigrants from Sweden. They subscribed to the melting-pot philosophy of the time and tried to learn English as fast and as well as possible by going to night school. When I was four, my father lost his job in the depression of 1907. It was decided in family council that my mother would take me back to Sweden to live on her family's farm in Dalecarlia in central Sweden. By that time, though I understood everything in both languages, my English had become dominant. For your amusement let me share with you two poignant moments in my childhood.
The first took place on our arrival at my grandparents' modest red cottage, one of half a dozen little houses huddled together at the bend of a river. After the welcomes were over, I showed signs of boredom, so my mother suggested. I go and play with the children who had gathered outside. I approached to a safe distance, then stopped, waiting to be invited. But they just stared. Finally I broke the silence and said in English “Let's play.” It was as if the devil had appeared in their midst. They all turned tail and ran at top speed and did not stop until they were safe in their homes. There their mothers reassured them, told them who I was and that the strange language I spoke was English, a language spoken in America. The next day they reappeared and we began communicating, not in my Devilish but in their local Swedish dialect, which my mother told me later I mastered completely in three weeks.
The second episode took place on our return to New Haven, where my father had rented a flat for us. While my mother started unpacking, she sent me, now a boy of six, to the corner store to buy a quart of milk. I uttered my request so timidly that the man behind the counter heard “vinegar.” Unable to protest, for my English had sunk far below the surface, I went home fuming, placed the bottle on the table, and blurted out “Titta vad jag fick, och jag sa ‘milk.’ ” [“Look what I got and I said ‘milk.’ ”] My mother laughed, said she needed vinegar too, sent me back for milk, cautioning me to speak up loudly. This time everything went well.
As far as education is concerned I cannot help but agree with the National Commission on Excellence in Education. I fear we are a nation at risk and that we ought to examine more closely what others do.
For example, we are all familiar with the way the Japanese have learned English by the thousands while only a handful of Americans have learned Japanese. As a partial result, the Japanese have learned our industrial and technological know-how and are now better at our production game than we are. Japanese bilingual superiority is due not to a better bilingual-education program but rather to a superior educational system in general, which includes learning English. The Japanese have a longer school day, a longer school week, and a longer school year so that by the time they finish high school they are a good two years ahead of our high school graduates.
Perhaps even more significant than the native industry of the Japanese is the fact that the education of Japanese children begins in the home. As Takahiko Sakamoto writes, “Japanese preschool children begin to read at home…without any formal instruction or reading readiness programs” (240). Later in the article he elaborates:
According to one report, 36 percent of the surveyed preschool children's parents, usually mothers, began to read books to their children [when they were] at one year of age, 31 percent of them began when the children were two years old, and 23 percent of them [began when the children were] at the age of three. Those who had not read to their children until [they were] four years of age were only 7 percent of all the parents. It was also reported that the earlier the parents began to read, the more fluently the children could read by themselves when they were five years of age.
(242)
To extend our global perspective a little, let me briefly consider the situation in Yugoslavia.
Zlata Jukic, educational adviser in the Institute of Education and Pedagogy, in Novi Sad, Vojvodina, writes in English, “The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is among the few countries in the world in which there is no single official language.” She writes further: “In Yugoslavia, education is offered in twelve equal languages” (1). The Socialist Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, where Zlata Jukic lives and works, has five languages of equal status: Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Slovak, Rumanian, and Ruthenian. Children have the right to be taught in their native tongue (L-1), in the language of their social community, if different (L-2), or in another language of a Yugoslav nation or nationality (L-3). In plurinational Vojvodina some children acquire L-2 even before they enter preschool so that many children speak two or even three languages by school age (7). Jukic then describes the somewhat unusual case of a child who with the aid of an elder sister learned to read and write L-1 (Hungarian) and L-2 (Serbo-Croatian) in both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts for Serbo-Croatian before entering school. If one were a sociolinguistic engineer, it would be tempting to consider the possibility of sending our American children who are afraid of foreign languages to Yugoslavia to take the language baths and to experience a quick cure.
Sweden, my last global reference, has some 130 languages in its schools, but unlike us most Swedes believe that immigrants have a right to maintain their native languages and cultures, if they so desire. Sweden's official linguistic policy for its immigrant children is “full bilingualism” (Engberg 703). This policy was translated into a government bill in 1975 laying down guidelines for immigrant and minority policy—the goals of which are summed up in three terms: “equality, freedom of choice, and partnership.” From a document in English published in Sweden and titled Immigrants and Immigrant Teaching in Sweden let me quote what is meant by these terms.
The goal of equality implies continuing effort: to assure immigrant groups of living conditions equivalent to those of the national population. Maintenance of the goal of equality is conditional on immigration being constantly adapted to the ability of society to provide immigrants with employment, housing, social care and education on the same terms as the rest of the population.…
The goal of freedom of choice means that linguistic minorities domiciled in Sweden must be enabled by the community to decide for themselves the extent to which they are to retain and develop their original cultural and linguistic identity and the extent to which they are to assume a Swedish identity.…
The goal of partnership means that fruitful cooperation should be established between immigrant and minority groups and the majority population. … This means that the various groups must become, and be seen to be, equal partners in society, which means that they must be given support in establishing their own organizations and expressing their own opinions through their own news publications. The goal of partnership also means that immigrants should be induced to participate in Swedish affairs and that it must be made easier for them to play an active part in Swedish politics and trade union affairs. ( Immigrants 6–7)
During a recent visit to Yale, Ernest L. Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and compiler of the Carnegie report High School: A Report on Secondary Education in America , told his audience that “the high schools are at the mercy of the colleges” and suggested that the lack of commitment among colleges in general had led to the current state of weakness in the schools: “You cannot expect the schools to be any more vibrant than the colleges themselves” (“Compelling” 15). With which thought I leave you.
The author is Professor Emeritus of Spanish and Education at the University of Texas at Austin. This article is based on a presentation delivered at ADFL Seminar West, June 1984, in Austin, Texas.
Andersson, Theodore. Foreign Languages in the Elementary School: A Struggle against Modiocrity . Austin: U of Texas P, 1969.
“A Compelling Problem in America's Schools.” Yale Alumni Magazine and Journal . May 1984. 15.
Engberg, Eva. “Gunnar Tingbjörn: A Vignette,” Journal of Reading 36 (1983): 702–06.
Hayakawa, S. I. US English . PO Box 14181, Washington, DC 20044 [1984].
Hortas, Carlos. Rev. of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodríguez by Richard Rodríguez. Harvard Educational Review 53 (1983): 355–59.
Immigrants and Immigrant Teaching in Sweden . Stockholm: Official Statistics of Sweden, 1983.
Jukic, Zlata. “An Example of Reading at an Early Age: Hungarian and Serbocroation/Croatoserbian.” Unpublished paper.
Lee, Ok Ro. “Early Bilingual Reading for Bilingual/Bicultural Adjustment.” Unpublished paper.
Past, Kay Cude, Al Past, and Sheila Guzmán. “A Bilingual Kindergarten Immersed in Print.” Reading Teacher 33 (1980): 907–13.
Rodríguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodríguez . New York: Bantam, 1983.
Sakamoto, Takahiko. “Preschool Reading in Japan.” Reading Teacher 29 (1975): 240–44.
US Dept. of Education. National Commission on Excellence in Education. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform . Washington, DC: GPO, 1983.
© 1985 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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