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Cognitive Scientists on Bilingual Education by Steve Sailer UPI, October 27, 2000 |
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Arizona voters are about to decide whether to throw out bilingual education in favor of teaching English to immigrant children via the sink or swim method of "immersion." So, both sides are churning out statistics supporting their positions. Is there anyway to gain perspective on all this dueling data? Fortunately, a few disinterested scientists are offering some non-numerical guidance through the fundamentals of how kids learn languages. In California, immigrant students' tests scores shot up after a 1998 initiative banned bilingual schooling. The founder of the California Association of Bilingual Educators, Ken Noonan, school superintendent of Oceanside, even changed his mind. "Thirty years of commitment to something is hard just to set aside, but I think I was wrong," he commented. His immigrant students now "Love school, they're absorbing the English, learning quickly." This placed the bilingual industry, which had forecast doom for California's immigrant children, on the defensive. Much of America's English-language press has now jumped on the anti-bilingual bandwagon. Even in liberal New York City, all three papers have kept up a drumbeat of criticism of the city's massive bilingual education system. In reply, supporters of bilingual education have unleashed a barrage of statistics. For example, Stephen Krashen, Professor of Education at USC and possibly the foremost academic proponent of bilingual education, argues that nothing much can be learned from the new California test scores. "Districts that kept bilingual education improved, districts that never did bilingual education improved. Everybody improved." In five emails to this reporter, Krashen cited numerous studies supporting his conclusion: "There is overwhelming evidence from the research literature that bilingual education is effective." In turn, bilingual education's critics deride Krashen's conclusions, methods, and hands-on knowledge of how bilingual education really works. Ron Unz, the software entrepreneur who sponsored California Proposition 227 banning bilingual education, argues that the schools that switched to English immersion improved more than the rest. Further, he snapped, "If Krashen actually began visiting bilingual programs, he might be very, very surprised---and should be very, very ashamed of the millions of immigrant children whose education and lives he has helped to destroy." Perhaps it is time for an outside perspective on this rather claustrophobic debate among education researchers. Arguments based on school studies -- such as the endless one over how much good George W. Bush's school reforms did in Texas -- tend to turn out inconclusive, confusing, and mind-numbingly complex. There is a host of reasons for this. Schools are always changing in lots of different ways than in just the area of interest. So, the effects of any single policy tend to be hard to tease out from everything else that drives test scores up or down. For example, MIT professor Wayne O'Neil, a supporter of bilingual education, suggests, "The best guess is that whatever 'success' Oceanside has had is more a result of smaller class size, teaching to the test, and other uncontrolled-for factors than it is a result of Prop 227." Second, nobody ever agrees precisely on what the goal of any school policy is, so everybody can brandish their own pet studies supporting their own positions. For example, is the goal of bilingual education to get immigrants to read English? Or to perform at grade level in all subjects? Or to speak English without an accent? Or is it to prevent them from losing their original language so they can keep on talking to their grandmothers and remain part of a cohesive ethnic group? Third, since the term "bilingual education" (or, for that matter, "English immersion") covers a host of different policies, unwelcome results can always be waved away as being caused by the "wrong kind" of bilingualism or immersion. For example, Krashen says, "Oceanside had a lousy bilingual program." And even when a scholar's favorite flavor performs badly, he can blame the inconvenient outcome on incompetent implementation. This is always plausible because there certainly exist poorly run bilingual programs. John McWhorter, author of the much discussed new book "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America," is an African American linguist from Berkeley who admires Krashen's work. He argues, "Bilingual ed gets contaminated by identity politics. Some Latino administrators are more interested in preserving Latino "identity," and thus less interested in getting kids out of bilingual programs, where they are "at home." Finally, the kind of double-blind tests used in medical research -- where doctors don't know which half of their patients are getting the placebo -- are virtually impossible in school research. Therefore, school employees, whose careers can sometimes be riding on the outcome of the research, can teach the test and use other trickery. So, it may help to step outside the Education departments to learn what scientists who study language acquisition -- child psychologists, linguists, cognitive scientists, and anthropologists -- have to say about the fundamentals. Much of the rank and file in these fields publicly favors bilingualism. For example, the Linguistics Society of America formally opposed Unz's Proposition 227. Yet, a number of the best known scientist have raised serious questions about bilingualism, as well as English immersion. They tend to worry especially about two areas: peer pressure and the rapid decline in a child's ability to absorb a new language. Judith Rich Harris is a New Jersey grandmother who wrote child psychology textbooks dispensing the conventional wisdom that parents and schools are what mold children. Her problem was that her books couldn't explain how differently her own daughters had turned out. Harris' natural-born daughter was obedient and bookish. Her adopted daughter was a hell-raiser who thought she was too cool for school. Harris dove into the research and discovered what parents since Adam and Eve have sensed about their kids. As she makes clear in her controversial 1998 book, "The Nurture Assumption," like Cain and Abel, they turn out differently because they inherit different genes. Possibly even more importantly, if no more surprisingly, Harris also found that kids are extremely sensitive to what other kids think and do. Harris suggests, "Yes, there is a window of opportunity before puberty in which most children can learn a new language quickly and well." But she emphasizes what happens on the playground rather than in the classroom. "Language and accent follow what I call the "majority rules rule." Children who come into the group with a different language or accent will quickly pick up the majority's language and accent in order to conform. If, for example, a child moves with her parents from Boston to Louisiana, she will soon be speaking with a Louisiana accent, though her parents will always sound like Bostonians." Harris goes on to note, "The problem with bilingual education is that these programs create peer groups of children who do not speak English well. They don't have to learn English in order to communicate with the children they want to play with, and they don't have to learn English in order to be accepted by their classmates. So, their motivation to learn English is no different from their motivation to learn the state capitals or the multiplication tables. Instead of being a vital part of their social life, it's just another boring chore assigned to them by the teacher." Mass immigration, however, means there are no easy solutions. Harris points out, "The immersion method works best when there are just a few kids in the school who don't speak English. When there are a lot of kids who share some other language, it's always going to be an uphill job to convince them to switch to English." Bilingual education supporter Jill Kerper Mora of San Diego State documents the size of the problem. "Only one out of every three English language learners in the United States attends a school where native English speakers are the majority in the student population, and one third attend schools where 90% of their classmates are from their same native language group." This logic might imply that school integration through forced busing could be the best hope for children living in large immigrant enclaves to learn standard, accent-free English. Past busing and other integration programs, however, have driven many Anglo white kids out of urban public schools. So, in many cities the only large pool of native-born English speaking students left to immerse immigrants in is central city African Americans. Another key issue often overlooked in brouhahas over bilingualism is how little time the schools have to teach English before a young child's gift for learning new language ebbs away. This raises questions about the slower kind of bilingual programs that use the precious early years of schooling to first teach students to read in their native language before teaching them to read in English. When contacted, the three scientists who are possibly the biggest names in the science of language acquisition tended to agree that young children have an innate skill for new languages that rapidly drains away. MIT linguist Noam Chomsky is famous for demonstrating that children are born with an innate ability to learn words and grammar. He suggested caution on the subject. Still, this lifelong crusader for leftist causes pointed out, "There is no dispute about the fact that pre-puberty (in fact, much earlier), children have unusual facility in acquiring new languages." Chomsky's younger MIT colleague, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, author of the bestsellers "The Language Instinct" and "How the Mind Works," states, "When it comes to learning a second language, the younger the better. In a large study of Chinese immigrants who entered the US at different ages, those who arrived after puberty showed the worst English language skills. Still, this finding of 'younger is better' extended to far younger ages. People who began to learn English at six ended up on average more proficient than those who began at seven, and so on." As an illustration, Pinker points to the famously thick German accent of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who arrived in America at age fourteen. In contrast, his younger brother developed a standard American accent. Pinker's arch-rival, Terrence W. Deacon, a biological anthropologist at Boston U. and author of "The Symbolic Species," replied, "I have to agree with Steve Pinker (on this one particular issue) that learning a language early in life can be an advantage for developing language fluency and sophistication." Bilingual supporters dispute whether there really is a biological switch that turns off at puberty. Mora suggests that the reason children are better at learning a new language is because "Children are less inhibited and self-conscious than adults. They are willing to take more risks and interact with native speakers of the target language more as a consequence." Deacon, too, doubts Pinker's theory that there is a special language acquisition instinct that shuts down around puberty. He believes that young kids' impressive language learning abilities stem from "some special plasticity and adaptability of immature brains with less committed neural circuitry." He expects that puberty is just a milestone on a long downward spiral in the ability to learn new languages. "I think the empirical evidence in many subfields of language neuropsychology shows a gradual reduction of language learning plasticity over middle childhood, probably beginning about age seven. But I think we can generally agree that especially before age seven there exists the best possibility for thorough recruitment of brain systems for language." Deacon, however, points out that on this issue it doesn't particularly matter whether Pinker or himself is correct. "This does not affect the neurolinguistic consequences." And even if Mora's view that young children learn best merely because they are less self-conscious is true, that still seems to support Pinker's "the younger the better" rule of thumb. Deacon argues, "English immersion is not the same thing if begun at age 3-4 or at 8-9 or at 13-14. Unless begun at a very early age (e.g. ideally well before age 7) and maintained and used in diverse contexts, there is a good probability that the second language will never be so fully developed as the first language." Finally, this perspective also sheds light on the mirror-image question of when native-born parents should have their kids taught a foreign language such as French or Spanish. Deacon suggests that American-born parents are mostly kidding themselves by letting their children wait until high school. He states, "America's efforts to teach other languages in the schools are minimalist and almost entirely postponed until after puberty in most school systems, guaranteeing little assimilation of a second language." Steve Sailer (www.iSteve.com) is a columnist for VDARE.com and the film critic for The American Conservative.
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