Herb,

This is my first posting to the listserv, though I have been reading with interest for many months.

After reading your referenced posting this morning, I printed a copy of your “slogan” and took it with me to my Junior English class. I teach in a private high school on the North Side of Chicago, and we have more than 32 different languages/dialects represented among our student body.  My Junior class contains several students who marched in the May 1st immigration protest (with their families), and as I look around the classrooms, I see students who arrived in the US as children from Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Thailand, Bosnia, India, Pakistan, Greece, the Philippines and Mexico, as well as first-generation American Spanish, Urdu, and Greek bilingual speakers. My students are (not unexpectedly) passionately involved in immigration issues and, now, the language debate. Their final writing project for the year is to write a manifesto – and “English only” has been embraced as a topic by several.  So I brought your posting into class and put it out there for them.  It generated the kind of deep, emotional discussion English teachers dream of, but, most importantly, when I read them your “slogan,” we began to try to understand what the problem was that was trying to be solved.

The upshot of this is -- we don’t see the problem. The students – who, despite the private school cache, come from widely-different economic backgrounds – already know that English is the language of commerce, and if they want to work in the wider corporate world, they have to master English. To Eva, one of my Nigerian students, this is so obvious as to be ridiculous: she learned English in Nigeria before her family ever dreamt of emigrating, because it was required in her school.  My students also realize how difficult it is to learn a new language as an adult, and so some immigrants who didn’t have the opportunity to learn English as children are naturally going to have a tougher time. If there are no places where immigrants can go to learn English because (a) there is no funding for programs, or (b) no time to go due to work and child-rearing responsibilities, how justified are we to have expectations that they master English virtually overnight? My Juniors seem to be of a mind that legislation about language is essentially xenophobic and based on myth – and the word “bandwagon” keeps popping up in their comments. If there is a problem that legislation will solve, frankly, we just don’t get it.

So I posted your slogan on the bulletin board in my room, and let the discussion go on in my room of seventeen-year-olds.  THEY are the future of the country – THEY are the ones who have been through ESL programs and remedial English step-up summer school and who are living with this “language problem” every day.  It’s all very well and good for professionals, politicians and academics to debate this issue – but has anybody asked THEM? Someone ought to ask them, because they are getting angry about this, and they are not going to keep quiet for very much longer.  I can’t wait to read their manifestos.


Kimberley Hunt
Instructor, English Dept.
St. Scholastica Academy, Chicago



-----Original Message-----
>From: "Stahlke, Herbert F.W." <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: May 21, 2006 8:28 PM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: English for Immigrants
>
>Dear Peyman,
>
>I'd like you to put this exchange in context.  I set the discussion off by commenting, somewhat ironically, on Pres. Bush's immigration speech, his insistance that immigrants learn English, and the lack of government support for them to do so.  The focus of the discussion has been on Hispanic immmigrants because that was the issue Bush and Congress were dealing with, immigrants crossing the southern border into the US, the vast majority of them Spanish speakers.  No one said, "only immigrants from Mexico are immigrants," and I strongly doubt that anyone on the ATEG list is so poorly informed as to believe that.  I have lived in the Southwest, and, in fact, most of the Hispanic population in the Southwest is Native American.  Much of the Hispanic immigrant population in the US is also Native American.  I'm also puzzled by your question of whether "a Hopi person or an apache person would ... not be able to find a job due to not knowing Spanish."  I don't believe that anyone in this discussion was defending only one minority group to the exclusion of all others.  Again, the context was Pres. Bush's speech and the current political issues around immigration across our southern border.
>
>As to making English the official language of the US, that issue hasn't been raised at all.  However, since you've raised it, let me address it.  Ever since John Adams was president, early in the history of this country, there have been attempts to legislate English as the official language of the US.  No such legislation has ever succeeded.  A number of states have passed official English legislation, and most of these laws have been struck down in state and federal courts as discriminatory and as violating the First Amendment.  This has been the case in Alabama, Arizona, and Alaska, as well as other states.  If you look at census fgiures on non-English speaking residents of the US, the number is less than five percent of the US population, a number made up of new immigrants, of young children, and of older family members who do not work outside the home.  
>
>There is no need for legal pressure to learn English.  It's very strongly economic.  To build a life and to prosper in the US pretty much demands a command of English.  The historic cycle of immigrant language learning, which continues with contemporary immigrants, is that immigrant adults who do not know English learn it as well as they can.  Their children grow up bilingual.  Their children's children grow up as monolingual English speakers who preserve some of the cultural practices of their heritage.
>
>I write as a first generation native speaker of English.  My parents, both of whom were born in this country in 1906, were monolingual German speakers until they started school at the age of seven.  That was when they began to learn English.  They were both bilingual adults.  My family spoke German at home for the 11 years of my parents' marriage before I was born.  My father was a Lutheran pastor in a small town south of Detroit, where there was a sizable German-Russian population that wanted worship services conducted in both English and German.  During World War II, FBI agents would come down from Detroit about every other Sunday to sit in on my father's sermons and check them for subversive content.  When I was born in 1942, my family decided to stop speaking German at home.  The war, the FBI, and the fact that my elder siblings all spoke English in school together combined to make switching to English a desirable choice.  As a result, my younger sister and I did not grow up bilingual.
>
>My mother tells a story of when she was a girl in Hamtramck, MI.  My grandfather was pastor of the local Lutheran church, and my mother attended the parochial school.  The neighborhood was made up of German, Hungarian, and Russian immigrants.  The children played together and all picked up a bit of each other's languages.  The parents of all three groups used English outside the home and encouraged their children to also.  Many of these children attended the Lutheran parochial school where all morning subjects were in German and all afternoon subjects were in English.  The children of all three groups studied both German and English.  My mother told me that on Nov. 11, 1918, when the armistice was announced, all the teachers and children gathered around the flagpole in front of the school and sang "Now Thank we all our God"--in German.
>
>Language policy and linguistic acculturation are complex issues that don't lend themselves well to slogans, but slogans, unfortunately, are what we get from politicians and from the media.
>
>So I'll end with an argument that smacks of a slogan:  legislating English as the official language of the US is a solution in search of a problem.
>
>Herb 
>
> 
>--- "Stahlke, Herbert F.W." <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> This is true.  There is a long-standing
>> Spanish-speaking population in
>> the Southwest, especially Texas, New Mexico, and
>> Arizona that long
>> predates Anglo domination of those areas.  That
>> Hispanic settlement is
>> in the neighborhood of 350 to 400 years old, so you
>> are certainly right
>> your implication that Spanish has been spoken much
>> longer than English
>> in parts of what is now the United States.  To
>> consider the descendents
>> of these early settlers to be interlopers,
>> immigrants, or in any way not
>> as fully American citizens as anyone else is not
>> only historically
>> ignorant but insultingly jingoist.  Of course, it
>> fits in very nicely
>> with the Disneyesque Alamo myth (a little irony
>> again).
>> 
>> Herb
>> 
>> Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:
>> 
>> >Omar,
>> >
>> >Note my posting to Jose on irony.  I'd go with 500
>> years.  600 seems a
>> >stretch.
>> >  
>> >
>> My parents are in New Mexico. It was one of the
>> first areas of European 
>> settlement in North America. The locals still speak
>> a peculiar kind of 
>> Spanish, or so I have been told. Not everyone who
>> speaks Spanish is a 
>> "wet back". People in the Southwest seem to
>> understand this.
>> 
>> Omar
>> 
>
>I am an immgrant myself, a naturalized citizen, and I
>don't believe the perspective you are presenting here
>is fair.  To say that only immigrants from Mexico are
>immigrants, and to say that only they don't have to
>learn English is wrong.  It exludes other immigrant
>groups.  Also the southwest, if any of you ever
>actually spend time there, is originally native
>american; how do you like the fact that because of
>rhetoric like this, a Hopi person or an apache person
>would finally leave the reservation, go to phoenix or
>albaquerque, and not be able to find a job due to not
>knowing Spanish?  How is that ever fair in America?
>
>When you continually defend one minority group and
>only one minority group, you are excluding all other
>minorities.  English as the official language of the
>United States protects all minorities and not just
>one, as you tend to push for.
>
>sincerely, an immigrant by the way.
>
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