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Bilingual Problems and Developments in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Garland Cannon
Garland Cannon*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Abstract

The once bleak situation of non-native English speakers in the U.S., who suffered in a monolingual English curriculum and faced discrimination because of their language, has somewhat improved. Passage of the Bilingual Education Act in 1967 and its implementation through fifty-eight projects funded for eight million dollars by the U.S. Office of Education in 1970-71 have given bilingual opportunities to some of the five million American children who speak Spanish or some language other than English as their first language. However, major problems persist. There is need for international cooperation in bilingual activities. Funds are inadequate. Existing American programs cannot yet be reliably evaluated, and they are not reaching enough children. There is some formlessness in their general direction and national shaping. Higher education needs to (1) adjust teaching methodologies, evaluation procedures, and admissions policies until the present culture-biased tests can be replaced by linguistically valid, dispassionate instruments; (2) increase financial aid to non-native speakers of English; and (3) establish special bilingual teacher-training programs and materials-development centers. Development of comprehensive bilingual programs at the precollege and college levels is imperative, despite their enormous cost.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 3 , May 1971 , pp. 452 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Notes

1 Text of the Bilingual Education Act of 1967, Tables i-v, pp. 16–23.

2 Some basic sources on the subject are Uriel Weinreich's Languages in Contact (New York: Linguistic Circle of New York, 1953), Einar Haugen's Bilingualism in the Americas (University, Ala.: American Dialect Society, 1956), Joshua Fishman's collection Language Loyalty in the United States (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), John Macnamara's Bilingualism and Primary Education: A Study of Irish Experience (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1966), and Theodore Andersson and Mildred Boyer, Bilingual Schooling in the United States, 2 vols. (Austin, Tex.: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, 1970).

3 See Evelyn Bauer's “Teaching English to North American Indians in BIA Schools,” Linguistic Reporter, 10 (Aug. 1968), 1–3.

4 The projects are described in the Office of Education's “Notification to Members of Congress” of 20 May and 29 May 1969. Similar “Notifications” describe the 1970–71 projects, dated 18 June and 30 June 1970.

5 See, e.g., The Invisible Minority, the 1966 Report of the NEA-Tucson Survey on the Teaching of Spanish to the Spanish-Speaking (Washington, D. C. : NEA, 1966).

6 See Description and Measurement of Bilingualism, ed. L. G. Kelly (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969).

7 Problems beset even long-established literacy movements like Mexico's Campana de Alfabetismo, Paraguay's determined efforts to help Guarani Indians learn Spanish, or largely English-speaking Ireland's policy of using Irish as the language of instruction in the primary grades in the national schools.

8 Leonard Buder, “Open-Admissions Policy Taxes City U. Resources,” New York Times, 12 Oct. 1970, p. 1.

9 An alternative is discussed in Howard Ray Rowland's “A National University: Lost Cause or Hidden Reality,” Educational Record, 50 (1969), 309–18.