Kimberly,
   I want to thank and commend you for a fine first time post.  I, too,
have students who bring very rich language backgrounds to the
classroom, and I can recognize the pleasure of tapping into the
experience and commitment they bring to these questions.  I think a
relevant legal concept is "standing."  These students have so much more
at stake than you and I do, and it's important to recognize that, as
you seem to. Who am I to say, for example, that one of my students
shouldn't send their children to an after school program to learn
Hebrew or shouldn't read to them in Spanish? If you ask why, you get
enormously interesting answers. I hope we never get to the point in
this country where we legislate cultural values as passed on within the
family.>Many families struggle to hold on to their children and to very
traditional values despite the influences of neighborhoods and media.
Language often intertwines with this.
   As a teacher, I think it's delightful to have questions that we can't
provide the final answers to. We can ask of the writing projects that
come out of this that they be thoughtful, clear, engaging,
comprehensive enough to anticipate and respond to thoughtful points
from the other side, well organized, well cited, and so on. These are
very current, very substantial, very important issues, not the trumped
up questions we often get in composition readers. What better way to
help them hone critical reading skills, complex skills for writing that
includes reading, oral skills in classroom presentations, and so on. We
can convince them that public issues matter and help them gather the
resources to join that public conversation and not simply have their
situation defined by other people.
   It's great to hear the enthusiasm in your own reporting. It's really a
matter of tapping into the energy of our students.  Our job as teachers
is to help them understand their own situation and help them speak.  So
many "skills" come along for the ride.

Craig

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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