To all:

Code mixing in the classroom is indeed a very efficient way to hold 
back the social and economic development of the African-Americans or 
other ethnic groups in this country. It is indeed a discrimination 
matter, and its effect can be comparable to the damage welfare has 
caused to the African-Americans, Hispanics and other people in this 
country. Bill Cosby knows is very well, and this is why he has been 
lashing against this suble discrimination which bears the pretense of 
helping minorities. 

Why should African Americans be helped to move as fast as they could 
in order to obtain a good knowledge of Standard English, do well in 
school, and get good jobs, when they can be sabotaged through code 
mixing? Using a "research article" to prove that code mixing works in 
the classroom is just the same as using Hillocks article to prove 
that grammar causes brain damage to students and does not help in any 
way in developing better writing in students.

The 13 years I spent in Queens, and my undergraduate and graduate 
research in language acquisition and language learning have taught me 
that the best way for students to learn a dialect or a language is 
through immersion. I saw again and again children of Eastern European 
background (Russian, Polish, Check, Romanian, Yugoslavian), come to 
New York with absolutely no knowledge of English and becoming fluent 
in Standard English after one, at most two years, of immersion in the 
public school Standard English. The English teachers, who knew only 
their mother tongues, could not switch or mix code on these foreign 
students, but this fact did not deter them from training the students 
to speak fluent English in record time. I can repeat the same story 
for the thousands of Haitian, Dominican, Columbian,Brazilian, and 
other Hispanic children who came to New York with their monolingual 
parents. 

We keep talking about English dialect codes in this country without 
little understanding of the social, political, and economic power the 
Standard American Dialect has in the lives of the people who live 
here. Languages and dialects can make or break countries or cause 
civil wars, can destroy the lives of people ( remember what happened 
to those who spoke German or Japanese in the United States during the 
second world war), can hold people back socially, economically and 
politically, and can create welfare societies. For those who are not 
sure of the power that dialects and languages can have on people I 
recommend "Language and Social Context" edited by Giglioli, and other 
books on the subject.
 
What children of any ethnic background who live in this country need 
in order to become successful in school and in society is a good 
knowledge of Standard American English which should be obtained 
through Standard Dialect immersion, not code mixing. This is the 
approach which will put an end to language, social, and economic 
discrimination in the United States. If we are truly against 
discrimination, we should leave language welfare programs behind us.


Eduard 

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