Last modified: December 22, 2006.
HARVARD Latino LAW REVIEW
Jennifer L. Chong[*]
Tongue-Tied: The Lives of Multilingual Children in Public Education. Otto Santa Ana[†], ed. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004. Pp. 311. $24.95.
Tongue-Tied: The Lives of Multilingual Children in Public Education [hereinafter Tongue-Tied] is a collection of personal narratives, book excerpts, essays, scholarly articles, and poems about the experiences of multilingual children in the United States public education system.[1] Contributors are diverse and include fiction writers, linguists, teachers, educational researchers, and professors from fields such as Chicano/Latino studies, African American studies, Native American studies, and English. All the contributors either grew up as a multilingual or multicultural child, work with such children, or both.[2]
This Book Review consists of three parts. Part I provides an overview of the book, including the general structure, the context of the book’s development, and the themes common to the entire collection. Part II is a more specific critique of the book regarding its strengths and weaknesses, both in terms of the individual pieces and the anthology as a whole. Part II also includes questions the book raises. Part III looks closely at several individual selections that reflect and represent the flavor of the collection.
Santa Ana[3] and his student researchers developed Tongue-Tied as a response after California voters passed Proposition 227 in 1998, which
*** Top of Page 164 ***
limits public school children to one year of bilingual education before they must be mainstreamed into English-only classrooms.[4] The intent behind the proposition seemed to be phasing out bilingual education altogether, which, together with several other contemporaneous propositions (e.g., Proposition 209, which severely limits affirmative action),[5] reflects the anti-immigrant stance of much of the California public. Santa Ana and his students assembled an anthology of works from writers with first-hand experience with multilingualism in public education. They collected pieces from writers who grew up with families that spoke Spanish, various Native American languages, Polish, Chinese, or African American English at home. The focus of the anthology is the child: the child’s experience as a language minority student and the consequences of this experience on future educational and career opportunities, cultural identity, and self-image.
Considering the diverse experiences, and cultural and professional backgrounds of the contributors, the unity of theme between the individual pieces is striking. Evidence from multiple disciplines indicates that growing up bilingual in the United States is a struggle, and the locus of much of the difficulty is school.[6] In many cases, the school system makes the problem worse instead of better. When children are prevented from using their first language but are not yet comfortable in English, the overwhelming result is that these children are silenced. Another common theme is a loss of cultural identity, concurrent with the sublimation of the child’s first language.
After a foreword, student preface, and Santa Ana’s introduction, the book is divided into six parts. Each part begins and ends with several short quotes foreshadowing or uniting the theme of the chapter.[7] Part I, “The Child’s Struggle against Silencing,” consists mostly of personal narratives with a handful of poems. The writers, well-known authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston[8] or scholars such as Antonia Castañeda,[9] write about their own bilingual childhoods. In this section, the reader sees bi-
*** Top of Page 165 ***
lingual children stifled or withdrawn into silence when they are not allowed to speak their first language.[10] Change of language is frequently associated with childhood trauma involving culture clashes and racism.[11] One narrative describes the uniquely difficult situation that many bilingual children face: translating for their parents in such serious adult contexts as health care and finances.[12] Many remember feeling as if they were permanently between languages; they became rusty with their first language and eventually could no longer use it well, but they never became fully at home with English either.[13] These adults often felt that, as children, they had lost their culture and cultural identity along with their language.[14] Due to the intensely personal nature of the pieces, Part I is the most consistently engaging reading of the entire book. Using it as the first section to capture the reader’s interest was a good choice on the editor’s part.
Part II, “The History of Silencing Children,” is a timeline of events, court decisions, and legislation affecting language minority children. The shortest section of the book, dry compared to Part I, provides a historical context that is useful background information for the rest of the book. However, this section focuses mostly on history affecting Chicano/Latinos and mainland Native Americans, neglecting to include some of the major legal landmarks affecting Hawaiian Natives, Alaskan Natives, Asian Americans, and, in earlier years African Americans.[15] One relevant omission that immediately springs to mind is the Japanese American internment in California during World War II. More extensive detail or annotation along with each event would have made this section livelier.
Part III, “The Potential and Vulnerability of Multilingual Children,” consists of six longer pieces, most of which are abridgements from scholarly articles or books. The tone is more academic and research-oriented than the first two parts. Each piece stresses the importance of teachers who are very interested and invested in their students’ learning process, so that they can identify with students on the students’ “own turf” and under-
*** Top of Page 166 ***
stand their culture and community. When students could connect to teachers, and teachers grew to know the students’ families and communities, the students learned better. The pieces also stress the importance of simply getting children to talk—in whatever language or dialect—and to think about language in a positive way, getting away from notions of “correctness” or of certain dialects being “better” than others. In one account, a Harlem schoolteacher gets his student excited about language through discussions of etymology.[16] The children are enthusiastic to learn about the dynamic nature of language growth, and the teacher validates, instead of denigrating, the contributions of the students’ first languages and dialects to the continuous development of Standard American English.
The fourth part of the book, “Mother Tongue,” focuses more specifically on the students’ family language. Like Part I, most of the pieces are autobiographical narratives or poems. In many cases, the family language is also the student’s first language, but in other cases, there was so much emphasis on English that the individual never learned the language of their parents or grandparents (or lost it through lack of use). When this happens on a large scale across many families, the traditional language can effectively die because none of the younger generation speaks it.[17] Common among the writers is a sense of loss of the language of their heritage, and a feeling of distance from their cultural roots as a result of not using their family’s language. Another common theme is the rift that develops between parents and their children, as children may become more accustomed to functioning entirely in English while the parents still speak only one language or are limited in their use of English.[18]
“Excellence and Neglect in the Schooling of Multilingual Children,” the fifth section of the book, is a collection of abridged articles on educational research. The articles describe what has been successful and what produces poor results in the education of multilingual children. Overall, the researchers agree that the educational experience is most efficacious when the students’ languages and cultures are validated. When schools tell students that they should replace their cultural values with the cultural values of the school, or that the way they speak is “wrong,” their educational experience will be far less effective than if the school and teachers supported the students’ home culture and language, while teach-
*** Top of Page 167 ***
ing an additional one if need be.[19] Most of the research and practical guidelines in this section are general to all cultural and linguistic groups, although one focuses on Latinos and two focus on African Americans. The two articles about African American education were written in response to a local school board’s controversial resolution to recognize Ebonics[20] as the primary language of its African American students for pedagogical purposes, and they provide an informed counterpoint to the media hysteria that surrounded the initial decision. Part V mirrors Part III (“Potential and Vulnerability of Multilingual Children”) and offers similar advice. Many recommendations, although they may be particularly vital to bilingual children, seemed broadly applicable as sound educational practices for all children.[21]
The sixth and final part of the book, “Rage, Regret and Resistance,” serves as both a status check and a call to action for those concerned with bilingual education. In this section, the pieces stress reclaiming the identity and power of bilingualism. Several pieces discuss minority adults who, as children, did not use the traditional language of the family and are now beginning to learn or relearn it.[22] A distinguished poet tells about writing in English as a Chicano, and how his Chicano heritage and identity should and do influence his poetry.[23] A Chicana calls upon marginalized women to reclaim writing as their own instrument of power.[24] The final two pieces reflect, perhaps, the editor’s prediction of the future: an essay in which the writer code-switches[25] deftly between Spanish and
*** Top of Page 168 ***
English,[26] and a poem welcoming the Chicano/Latino influence of Spanish on American English.[27]
The back cover of the book classifies it as “Education,” that is, it would be shelved in the education section at a bookstore. But this book could easily be utilized in a variety of academic contexts. Of course, it would be most useful for someone studying education, or for teachers, administrators, or policy makers already in the school system. It would also make a wonderful addition to an undergraduate course on sociology, linguistics, ethnic or cultural studies, or child development. The book would be equally useful in a law class, particularly a class on education law or minority issues, or in a government policy course. However, the book is enjoyable and readable enough that it should not remain in academia: it seems to have been compiled and edited with a wide audience in mind, and it is completely accessible to the layperson.[28] The personal narratives and poems read like short fiction, and the scholarly articles are abridged and synopsized so that one need not have a background in research to appreciate them. If it succeeds in reaching a broad and diverse audience, Tongue-Tied could play a substantial role in educating the public about the realities of multilingual children.
Overall, the book was quite good, both because it was an enjoyable read and because it will be a useful book in the debate about educating multilingual children. A book written and edited like this one will be of interest to a broad spectrum: academics from a variety of fields, policy makers, and members of the general public will be able to understand and learn from the book. A particular strength of the book is its apparent neutrality and balance; it is not written or edited in such a way as to alienate those that it seeks to educate and convince. Instead, the compelling personal stories and academic research are effective at showing the average person what it is like to grow up as a bilingual child in the United States and why such a background is challenging in different ways than one
*** Top of Page 169 ***
might think. It would have been easy to compile a book that only the most ardent of bilingual education supporters would identify with, but with this book, Santa Ana succeeded in developing an anthology that even those who voted to limit bilingual education will find accessible and informative. Although the educational policy and political undertones are apparent, the book steps back and lets the pieces themselves demonstrate and advocate the rationale behind the importance of better addressing the needs of bilingual children, rather than perpetuating the “manifestos, slogans, and half-truths . . . noisily recited for front-page headlines and television sound bites” regarding these issues.[29]
More than any other genre in this book, the personal narratives will probably resonate with those who previously had little understanding of bilingual children. These pieces were written by famous authors[30] and English professors at top universities.[31] These contributors are extraordinarily “good at” English: they built prestigious careers founded on writing and speaking the language. If best-selling authors and Ivy League professors recount their English-only public education experiences as alienating, traumatic, and extraordinarily difficult, one can only imagine that the experience of the average non-English speaking child is far more so. Not even those most gifted with language found their educational experience adequate. How could such a system even begin to be sufficient support for the child whose greatest talents lie elsewhere?
Although the editor is a Chicana/o Studies professor,[32] the book deliberately does not limit itself to the experiences of Chicana/o children. Instead, it incorporates pieces representing a variety of languages, ethnicities, and cultures, showing the breadth and pervasiveness of the problems surrounding the public education of bilingual children. The inclusiveness broadens the audience and encourages political unity between affected groups that can ultimately lead to a stronger voice and greater power for all language minorities. It would be easy for groups to become divided and pitted against one another on this issue; if the problem is instead seen as common to many, there will be more success in advancing the interests and concerns of each individual group.
*** Top of Page 170 ***
Tongue-Tied focuses on the public education of children, but the book also functions to raise awareness of issues of languages and language minorities generally. The short quotes at the beginning and end of each section are thought provoking and representative of the broad themes of the book.[33] Part IV, “Mother Tongue,” functions almost as a crash-course in introductory linguistics. Without necessarily identifying the linguistic phenomena as such, the section addresses the nature of code-switching,[34] dying languages,[35] cognates,[36] borrowed words,[37] and dialects.[38] Articles in other sections introduce sociolinguistics,[39] pidgins, and creolization.[40]
In addition to language issues, the book touches on racism and intolerance of people who do not speak the same way as the majority. In one poem, the speaker tells how, as a child, he helplessly watched his grandfather face discrimination because he spoke Spanish, but not “English—the invader’s sword, the oppressor’s language.”[41] In a personal narrative,
*** Top of Page 171 ***
another writer relates how a hospital told her mother (a Chinese immigrant who only learned English as an adult) that her CAT scan had been lost, but only when the daughter spoke with the doctor in Standard American English did the doctor give assurance that the CAT scan would be found.[42] Not all of the stories of prejudice and intolerance involve the white majority. Two works describe Mexican American women who feel as if they are on the outskirts of the Spanish speaking community, one because she is not a native speaker of Spanish,[43] the other because she speaks Chicano Spanish instead of Latino Spanish.[44] In addressing these issues that go beyond public education, the book includes in its scope the broader questions that contribute to the problems multilingual public school children face.
As effective as Tongue-Tied is, there are several things that could have been better in the book. A few criticisms are technical or structural and relate to editing; most are thematic and relate to the articles chosen for inclusion.
On the technical side, the abridged academic research articles could have included less summarizing and interpretation by the editor, and more excerpts of the researcher’s own wording from the original article, with perhaps a few words to tie the excerpts together. This would preserve the voice and perspective of the original author while still making the articles accessible to the non-academic reader. Also, the citation information should have appeared either with the title or at the end of the article to make it easier for the reader to find the original work. In Part II, the case law summaries were sometimes misleading.[45] Additionally, the book could have included a conclusion to help the reader integrate the many different ideas they have just encountered. The preface and introduction were good for orienting the reader to the issues and the context of the book, but a conclusion at the end of the fifty-five articles would have made the work feel more complete.
*** Top of Page 172 ***
The first thematic criticism relates to a way in which the book was also very strong: Tongue-Tied generally reached beyond the Chicano/Latino experience to include African Americans, Native Americans, European immigrants, and Asian Americans.[46] However, it could have also addressed the experiences of white Americans whose first language, like African Americans, is a dialect of English other than Standard American English. Santa Ana mentions working-class white dialects in his introduction,[47] which was a brilliant inclusion, but then he fails to return to this population anywhere in the book. Including working-class or rural white dialects would broaden the relevance of the book, and perhaps encourage another audience to become invested in the importance of addressing the needs of all children who grow up speaking something other than Standard American English. This includes many whites, in addition to many of the ethnic minorities that are the focus of the book.
Much more could have been done in this book to paint bilingualism in a positive light: bilingualism as an asset, instead of as a stumbling block. To that end, there could have been a more balanced selection of children’s views toward their experience of growing up bilingual. Of the twenty pieces on children’s personal experiences in Part I, only one explicitly mentioned any positive reaction to growing up bilingual.[48] This criticism does not take anything away from the challenges that bilingual children face, but being bilingual from a young age also has advantages. Consider the following real-life examples: (1) a high school Spanish teacher tells her class that her native Spanish helped her tremendously on
*** Top of Page 173 ***
the SAT verbal section, because so many of the SAT vocabulary words are Latinate and cognates of Spanish words; and (2) a German family spends several years in the United States, and when they return to Germany, the five young children delight in having a “secret language” that they share with their brothers and sisters but other children cannot not understand. As these examples demonstrate, there is much about bilingualism that is desirable and beneficial to the individual, and the book could have emphasized these advantages.
Similarly, in the interest of highlighting the advantages of bilingualism, the book should have included information about voluntary bilingual programs that include both children whose first language is not English and children whose first language is English. César Chávez Elementary School in Davis, California, runs such a program: the instruction is partly in English and partly in Spanish, and the participants are both native English and native Spanish speakers.[49] In this Spanish immersion magnet school, language majority parents see such a benefit to children learning in a bilingual setting and becoming fluent in a second language that they choose to have their children (who would otherwise be in mainstream classes) in bilingual classrooms. Many private schools begin to teach children a second language from a very young age. Narratives or studies about the benefits of bilingual programs for all children, not just minority children, would have been an excellent addition to this book. Because white or native speakers of Standard American English would be able to see the benefits to their own linguistic, cultural, and ethnic group, it would incentivize them to promote bilingual programs instead of trying to eliminate them. The goal is to broaden the base of support for quality bilingual education.
A strong theme throughout Tongue-Tied, that is both understandable and yet a substantial shortcoming of the book, is the close connection it draws between language and culture or race. It is understandable because there is undeniably a substantial relationship between language and culture. When an individual learns languages other than English, a much fuller appreciation and understanding of the language speaker’s culture becomes available through knowing the language. In other cases, people choose to learn a language because they appreciate and identify strongly with its associated culture. But it is a troubling suggestion that the con-
*** Top of Page 174 ***
nection between language and culture or race would seem so strong as to be immutable.
At least one of the contributors to the book shares these concerns. In the poem Mi Problema, Michele M. Serros laments that other Chicanos see her as less Chicana and “unworthy of the color” because she did not grow up speaking Spanish and is now learning it as a second language.[50] She does not feel like she will be a “true Mexican” until she has perfected her Spanish.[51] People should not be robbed of their ethnic and cultural heritage merely because they do not share the language. Similarly, there should be room for the possibility of people embracing and being part of a culture even though it is not the one usually associated with their own race.
Contributors to the book emphasize that highly valuing students’ cultures, along with their languages, will promote these students’ educational success.[52] One group of researchers studying “majority-minority” schools, where Latinos were the plurality and white students were the minority, found that the “staff in these schools also celebrated the students’ cultures . . . schools we visited affirmed the customs, values, and holidays of the language-minority students’ countries in deeper and more consistent ways throughout the year.”[53] Facially, this sounds like a very good strategy, but the underlying assumptions seem to be: (1) white majority schools that currently do an inadequate job of teaching their students about valuing different cultures should continue to be exempt from the need to do so, because white majority schools already “value their students’ cultures;” and (2) schools with a large population of one minority group do not need to teach about and value the culture of other minority groups. Schools should validate the students’ own cultures, but they should also expose students to and validate the cultures of others in the interest of cross-cultural understanding and to avoid fostering an “us-versus-them” mentality.
The same researchers also advocate that school leaders should “be bilingual minority-group members.”[54] The emphasis on race in this statement is troubling. It is certainly important for students to have authority figures in the school who are like them in some ways, but representation of both the students’ language and race does not necessarily need to be found in the same person. This philosophy of choosing school leaders would eliminate Michele M. Serros, a woman who is culturally and racially Mexican, from being a school leader because she is not yet fluent in Spanish.[55] Similarly, it would eliminate from consideration a white
*** Top of Page 175 ***
man who grew up in Mexico speaking Spanish as his first language, because although he is culturally Mexican and speaks Spanish better than English, he is white. Of course, I do not take Lucas et al. to mean that they would automatically or necessarily eliminate Serros and the white man from working with Latino children, but the objection must be raised. Taken a little further, the recommendation becomes essentialist and misses the point of what the school system should be trying to foster in the education of both majority and minority children.
The ideal is for the children’s educational experience to encourage them to have positive interactions with a variety of races, cultures, and languages, not just their own, because no matter what their own race, culture, and language is, if they live in the United States, they will need to be able to relate to people who do not share these characteristics.
The suggestions about education could have a more pragmatic focus. Although many of the suggestions are potentially useful, some appear vague (not sufficiently explicit as to implementation),[56] overbroad (they would be just as applicable to monolingual students as bilingual students),[57] or even impractical (other factors, e.g., substantial funding or building additional school facilities, would be required to implement them).[58] There should be more concrete ideas that a parent could use to help a child with homework tonight, or that teachers or administrators could take from the book and implement in the classroom tomorrow. Reducing class size to twenty students, developing bilingual and sheltered basic and advanced level courses, and hiring qualified bilingual teachers are sound suggestions for improving the education of language-minority students,[59] but a school cannot make these things happen quickly without additional funding, which also requires some level of public support.
*** Top of Page 176 ***
The book’s well-supported anti-immersion perspective is interesting, and it raises the question of implications for second language acquisition pedagogy in general. Linguistic research supports the idea that students should be allowed to use their first language or code-switch while learning a new language.[60] But there are few, if any, contemporary second language classes that allow students to speak English with the instructor or with other students. Middlebury College’s highly regarded intensive summer foreign language program takes the immersion approach to the extreme: students may not use any language other than the target language for the entire duration of the program (six to nine weeks), whether eating, relaxing in the dorms, or playing volleyball.[61] Students may not read books or newspapers, talk on the phone, or watch TV in English. The prohibition is strictly enforced and followed with few exceptions, even for those with no prior exposure to the target language.[62]
If the work of bilingual education researchers is accepted, does that require fundamentally rethinking the way English speakers are taught other languages? Unlike many public school settings, private adult second language programs often lack the staffing or funding to support an immersion setting; thus, people pay significant amounts of money to enroll in, for example, Middlebury’s immersion program or a Berlitz course with small class sizes. Those running second language immersion programs such as these undoubtedly think their methods are pedagogically sound, but these methods are in direct conflict with what we know from bilingual education researchers. One could point to the age difference: Berlitz students are adults, not elementary and secondary school children. However, immersion is not necessarily any easier or more comfortable as an adult, as David Sedaris relates in his account of a French class he took in Paris as an adult.[63]
As is the case when there are multiple perspectives considered in the same work, this book raises some intriguing questions. One line of thinking opposes holding language-minority students back by keeping them in
*** Top of Page 177 ***
ESL or sheltered classes, because these classes often fail to adequately meet the academic, social, and emotional needs of immigrant children.[64] Another advocates offering a range of content-based classes and other courses in the students’ first language or in a bilingual setting.[65] At first, these two perspectives seem to be in opposition, but they are based on similar grounds. The main point common to both approaches is that ESL and sheltered classes are often ineffective or dysfunctional, and do not focus sufficiently on the content areas and skills that students need in order to stay interested, advance appropriately for their grade level, and prepare for college. The solution is to provide targeted instruction and support which will enable language-minority students to learn the necessary content and continue progressing in all subject areas, whether that is done in mainstream classes or bilingual classes.
The final Part of this Book Review is a closer look at several of the pieces included in the book. I chose these pieces primarily because: (1) they are representative of the best characteristics of the collection in terms of perspective and vision; and (2) they are some of the most effective pieces, based on interest, relevance, and/or readability. One piece is included from each of the three main genres of the book—scholarly research, personal narratives, and poems—and each piece represents a different language, culture, and race minority as well.
Some background information about the Ebonics controversy may be useful prior to analyzing Delpit’s article. In 1996, the Oakland School Board approved a resolution recognizing Ebonics as the primary language of African American students.[67] This decision received significant negative media attention and was the focus of a national uproar.[68] Although many Americans thought of Ebonics as a sub-standard version of informal English and opposed its recognition in the school setting,[69] linguists overwhelmingly supported the resolution.[70] Traditional teaching
*** Top of Page 178 ***
methods involve “correcting” Ebonics-speaking children’s “wrong” speech until it resembles Standard American English. However, educational research shows that the most effective way of teaching Ebonics-speaking children to use Standard American English is to teach it as if teaching a foreign language.[71] Instead of telling children that their way of speaking is “wrong,” this method contrasts Standard American English and Ebonics features, and students translate between the two languages.
Delpit’s article describes Ebonics as something she can neither be “for” nor “against,” as it is fundamentally a simple reality: Ebonics is the first language or dialect of many African American children. However, there is the concern that if these children do not also learn the standard dialect (Standard American English) used by those with social, economic, and political power, their opportunities will be severely limited. According to Delpit, “[w]hile having access to the politically mandated language form will not, by any means, guarantee economic success, not having access will almost certainly guarantee failure.”[72]
Delpit shows why the conventional “correction” method of teaching Standard American English is ineffective.[73] Because the student must continuously monitor his or her speech, talking becomes difficult, and the result is often that the child stops talking altogether. Delpit illustrates this point in teacher training courses by having the teachers learn a new “dialect” in which the speakers must add “iz” at a specified place in each syllable of a word. After training, the teachers must stand up and explain, using the new “dialect,” why they chose to become teachers. Delpit reports that “[m]ost only haltingly attempt a few words before lapsing into either silence or into Standard English” and comments that participants “invariably speak of the impossibility of attempting to apply rules while trying to formulate and express a thought.”[74]
Additionally, “correction” is ineffective because students may be reluctant to reject their home language in favor of Standard American English due to issues of group identity. Delpit cites a study showing that children whose first language was Pima used a form of English that was close to their teacher’s standard dialect from first through third grade, but by fourth grade, the students were moving toward the local dialect of English, indicating a realization of the importance of language in their group
*** Top of Page 179 ***
membership.[75] If accepting the standard dialect means rejecting their identity with their group, children are likely to resist doing so.
Delpit describes teaching techniques that affirm the children’s first language form while teaching the standard form. Teachers can have children discuss ways TV characters from different cultural groups talk, read books written in different cultural dialects, and make bilingual dictionaries translating Ebonics into Standard English. Role play is another valuable strategy, allowing children who learn dramatic parts in the standard dialect to become comfortable using it. Students can also play the roles of well-known newscasters who use Standard American English. All of these techniques raise children’s awareness of differences in language forms and familiarize them with the standard dialect without denigrating their own language form.
In addition to grammatic and syntactic differences, Ebonics also differs from Standard American English in discourse style and language use. In a study of children’s informal oral narratives, researchers found that white children tended to tell “topic-centered” narratives,[76] while black children often told “episodic” narratives.[77] White adults responded very negatively to the black children’s “episodic” stories, inferring that the student storyteller might be troubled by reading and language difficulties, as well as “‘family problems’ or ‘emotional problems’ [which] might hamper” the student’s “academic progress.”[78] Black adults, however, responded positively, calling such stories “well formed, easy to understand, and interesting” and predicting that the child was “exceptionally bright, highly verbal, and successful in school.”[79] The educational implications are clear: a lack of cultural and linguistic familiarity with different discourse styles could cause white school leaders to expect these black students to have academic and emotional problems, resulting in lowered expectations, and thus neglect to challenge them as they would children whose discourse styles were more similar to their own.
The “correctional” method also fails in teaching children to read. Teachers are more likely to correct “dialect-related” miscues[80] than miscues that are not “dialect-related.”[81] When teachers continuously correct Ebonics-influenced features in a child’s reading, they focus so much on pronunciation that they fail to realize when a student has understood the text—inarguably one of the most important functions of reading. Reading then frustrates the children, as they understand the text but are continu-
*** Top of Page 180 ***
ously told they are doing something wrong. Students may come to resist both the teacher and reading, having been forced to think of reading “not as something you do to get a message, but something you pronounce.”[82]
Delpit’s article is effective because she takes a pragmatic approach to an often inflammatory topic, and she substantiates her viewpoint very well. She looks at Ebonics not just in its educational context, but in its political context as well, and addresses the main concerns of those who do not understand or approve of the Oakland decision while affirming the views of the resolution’s supporters. The purpose of recognizing Ebonics was not to prevent or exempt African American children from learning the standard dialect in schools. Instead, the purpose was to teach African American children Standard American English in the most effective way possible, and Delpit presents research and evidence to show that children are more successful at learning the standard dialect when pedagogical methods make use of Ebonics and acknowledge it as valid. Ebonics is the starting point, and the children learn the standard dialect as a second dialect, not as a replacement for one that their teacher considers “wrong” or “deficient.”
In this way, Delpit’s article gives a concise example of what the entire book seems to be trying to do: broaden the support for improved education of language-minority children by presenting the case in a way that accurately represents the cause while making it understandable to the mainstream. Additionally, the teaching techniques that she advocates harmonize well with the prevailing philosophies for teaching language-minority children: affirm the child’s culture, set high expectations, and help the children to meet them.
Mother Tongue is a personal narrative about fiction writer Amy Tan’s mother and the English she speaks. Tan’s mother, who immigrated from China as an adult, speaks a kind of English that many would describe as “broken,” “fractured,” or “limited.”[84] Tan says many of her friends have difficulty understanding her mother’s speech, but to Tan it is perfectly comprehensible; it is simply one of “the Englishes I grew up with.”[85] Tan describes code-switching between her several “Englishes,” including the English her mother speaks, the simplified English she speaks to her mother, and the “carefully wrought” Standard American English “burdened . . . with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, and conditional phrases” that she learned in school.[86]
*** Top of Page 181 ***
Tan herself was ashamed of her mother’s English as a child, and she recalls people in stores, banks, and restaurants serving her mother badly or ignoring her because of the way she spoke, confirming Tan’s own belief about her mother: that “because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect.”[87] Like the bilingual children of many other immigrants, Tan recalls the difficulty of acting as interpreter and translator for her mother from a young age. Even as an adult, Tan sometimes needs to help with her standard dialect when others fail to respond to her mother’s English.
Just as Delpit describes with Ebonics-speaking children, Tan feels that, as a student, her achievement test, IQ test, and SAT scores, as well as her academic performance in English, were adversely affected by the influence of her immigrant family’s speech at home, resulting in her teachers steering her away from studying English and toward math and science.[88] She remembers fill-in-the-blank English tests and SAT-style word analogies as being particularly difficult given her language background and the reasoning processes underlying her mother’s form of English, which complicated Tan’s attempts to predict “correct” answers. This experience is consistent with evidence showing that standardized testing formats can disfavor minorities and students for whom English is a second language.[89]
Tan’s article describes the experience of many bilingual students. Because they can speak English, they are thrust into difficult, adult settings (e.g., business negotiations or medical conversations). But because the English they bring to school is not the standard dialect, they become alienated from or ashamed of their immigrant parents, and teachers fail to recognize the extent of their abilities, guiding them into race-stereotyped academic and career tracks. Tan, however, was “rebellious in nature and enjoy[ed] the challenge of disproving assumptions” and majored in English in college, going on to become a successful fiction writer, where she could incorporate the richness of all her different “Englishes” in her work.[90]
The final piece included for analysis is a poem by Burciaga, a preeminent Chicano poet and writer. The poem is included at the beginning of an essay about the humor and richness of bilingual cognates, but the
*** Top of Page 182 ***
focus here will be on the poem, which embodies the spirit of the essay. The poem is reprinted below (the numbered lines and line-by-line glosses for the Spanish words have been added):
1 Your sonrisa* is a sunrise *smile
2 that was reaped from your smile
3 sowed from a semilla* *seed
4 into the sol* of your soul *sun
5 with an ardent pasión* *passion
6 passion ardiente,* *ardent
7 sizzling in a mar de amar* *sea of love
8 where more is amor* *love
9 in a sea of sí* *yes
10 filled with the sal* of salt *salt
11 in the saliva of the saliva* *saliva
12 that gives sed* but is never sad. *thirst
13 Two tongues that come together
14 is not a French kiss
15 but bilingual love.
This poem is an outstanding demonstration of how the possibilities for playing with language grow exponentially when a person is bilingual and can assume a bilingual audience.[92] Burciaga pairs whole Spanish and English words together that look similar, e.g., sonrisa and sunrise (line 1), sal and salt (line 10), and sed and sad (line 12). In one case, the spelling and meaning of the words in both languages are the same although the pronunciation differs (saliva and saliva). Adeptly code-switching, he alliterates bilingually, repeating “s” sounds[93] several times in nearly all
*** Top of Page 183 ***
the lines, and repeating “m” in consecutive lines as well (lines 2-3 and 7-8). In some lines, he uses two words which are pronounced very similarly in both languages but have different meanings: sol and soul (line 4), a mar and amar (line 7, combining an English article with a Spanish noun to sound like another Spanish noun), more and amor (line 8), sea and sí (line 9). He also uses both the English and Spanish forms of certain words, e.g., mar (line 7) and sea (line 9) and sonrisa (line 1) and smile (line 2).
Particularly intriguing are the fifth and sixth lines, where Burciaga repeats the same noun and adjective, first using the English adjective and the Spanish noun in the English word order (adjective preceding the noun). In the sixth line, the word order is Spanish (adjective following the noun) with the noun in English and adjective in Spanish. In these two lines, he shows the similarities between the two languages—these words are nearly identical in form and meaning, and share common roots—while enjoying the artistic possibilities of their differences.
In addition to the form of the poem, its theme is also a celebration of bilingualism. The poem’s imagery evokes beauty, hope, love, and excitement: sunrises, smiles, passion, sizzling souls, and thirst that is never sad. He may have been addressing a love interest with his poem, but the poem could also be understood as one expressing love of bilingualism itself:[94] two tongues coming together not in the literal sense (which would result in a French kiss as in line 14) but in the figurative sense (tongue as a metaphor for language).
The vision of this poem is marvelous because it embraces the wonder of being bilingual, treasuring it as an asset rather than as a problem to be corrected or a liability to be hidden. Not only is the speaker delighted with his bilingual abilities, the reader also gets a thrill out of being able to follow the poem’s dexterous bilingual plays on words. This poem embodies the attitude toward bilingualism that the community should strive to foster, and also provides a taste of the wonderful possibilities that cannot exist in a monolingual framework.
Generally, Tongue-Tied is a well-constructed commentary on the history, current state, and future of multilingual children in the United States public education system. The book explains the challenges facing multilingual children, and provides some guidance as to how these challenges could be successfully addressed. With its multidisciplinary and multicultural selections, Tongue-Tied has the capacity to reach a wide audience, hopefully raising the overall awareness of the realities of multilingual children and showing that limiting bilingual education to its traditional form is in no one’s best interest.
[*] J.D. Candidate,
Harvard Law School, Class of 2005; A.B., University of California, Davis, 2000.
I would like to thank Angela M. Johnson for proposing this project.
[†] Otto Santa Ana is the Associate
Professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at UCLA.
[1] Tongue-Tied: The Lives of Multilingual
Children in Public Education (Otto Santa Ana ed., 2004) [hereinafter Tongue-Tied].
[2] The single exception is humorist
David Sedaris, who writes about taking a French course in Paris as an adult.
David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 71–74.
[3] Santa Ana has written a dozen articles
about the languages of Chicanos and the education of language minority children.
He is also author of the award-winning book, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors
of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (University of Texas
Press, 2002). Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 308.
[4] Erika Villegas, Student Preface
to Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at xv–xvi.
[5] Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 104.
[6] Of course, this is not surprising,
given that much of children’s lives takes place at school and with school-based
activities (e.g., after-school sports, interacting with friends from school,
etc.).
[7] For example, Part I, “The
Child’s Struggle Against Silencing” begins with a quote from Aldous
Huxley:
“Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble
of great sculpture.” Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 10.
[8] Maxine Hong Kingston is the
author of such highly regarded novels as The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood
Among Ghosts (Vintage Books, 1975). See Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 305.
[9] Antonia Castañeda received
her Ph.D. from Stanford University and is a history professor at St. Mary’s
University. See id. at 302.
[10] See, e.g., Armando Garnet
Ruffo, No Questions Asked, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 70. In this poem an Ojibwe speaker becomes
voiceless because he must use English.
[11] One of the stories evoking
the most trauma is Back in Those Days, in which Carol Yazzie-Shaw describes
how government agents took her and her brother away from their Navajo grandmother
to be put in a government school. Carol Yazzie-Shaw, Back in Those Days, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 48–54.
[12] Antonia Castañeda, ¿Qué dice? ¿Qué dice?
Child Translators and the Power of Language, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 66–69.
[13] See, e.g., Juanita M.
Sánchez, From “voz en una cárcel,” in Tongue-Tied, supra note
1, at 77 (“my voice is in the prison/ of my own history/ i never know/
am i being too spanish/ or not enough english?”).
[14] Indeed, one contributor even
lost his name. As a Nez Percé-Tsimshian boy, Phil George was renamed
by his schoolteacher. His given name was “Two Swans Ascending from Still
Waters.” Phil George, Name Giveaway, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 31.
[15] Brown v. Board of Education
of Topeka, 348 U.S. 886 (1954), and subsequent related decisions are included,
but very little pre-Brown information about African Americans is given. See Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 98–105.
[16] Herbert Kohl, From “36
Children,” in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 118–23.
[17] Hawaiian native Nana Veary
describes with sadness how few people still spoke Hawaiian, even as long ago
as the 1930s. Nana Veary, My Hawai`i, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 183, 179–83.
[18] See, e.g., Pat Mora, Elena, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 165 (a poem from the voice of a Mexican
immigrant mother who is losing her connection with her children due to the
loss of a common language); Amy Tan, Mother Tongue, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 169–73 (a Chinese American adult describes growing up with her immigrant
mother’s version of English).
[19] See, e.g., Daniel Solórzano
& Ronald Solórzano, Principles of Successful Schools for Multilingual
Children, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 197–200.
[20] The word “Ebonics” comes
from
“ebony” and “phonics,” and refers to a dialect or language
used by many African Americans. It is also known as African American English
or Black English Vernacular (BEV). See, e.g., John Rickford, Suite
for Ebony and Phonics: Reflections on African American English, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 236–41; Lisa Delpit, What Should Teachers Do about Ebonics?, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 242–48.
[21] Two articles cite Ronald Edmonds’s
“Effective Schools” model, which emphasizes “high expectations
and responsibility for student learning; strong instructional leadership; emphasis
on basic skill acquisition; frequent monitoring of student progress; and an
orderly and safe school environment.” Solórzano and Solórzano, supra note
19, at 199; see also Tamara Lucas, Rosemary Henze, and Rubén
Donato, The Best Multilingual Schools, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 201–13.
[22] Louise Erdich describes how
she is learning Ojibwe as a second language (she carries verb conjugation charts
in her purse), and how there has been a renewed interest in using and reviving
Ojibwe. Louise Erdich, Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 264–67.
[23] Benjamin Alire Sáenz, I
Want to Write an American Poem II, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 253–54.
[24] Gloria Anzaldúa, Speaking
in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 262–63.
[25] Code-switching occurs “when
bilingual people use both languages in speech, alternating between the two
. . . code-switching occurs at the word, phrase, or sentence level. Linguists
consider code-switching to be a creative use of language by bilinguals who
know both languages well.” Virginia Collier, From “Teaching
Multilingual Children,” in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 229, 222–35.
[26] Abby Figueroa, Speaking
Spanglish, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 284–86.
[27] Gina Valdés, English
con Salsa, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 287.
[28] However, the book will read
more easily for someone who also has some knowledge of Spanish. Although there
are a few words and phrases of other languages (e.g., Native American languages),
most of the bilingual works in the book use Spanish. Even though there are
glosses whenever there are long stretches of Spanish, much would be lost by
not being able to understand entire sentences as the author wrote them, and
jumping around on the page between the text and the translation would be distracting.
Especially with the Spanish-English poems, the reader will enjoy them more
if they understand Spanish.
[29] Villegas, supra note 4, at xv.
[30] See, e.g., Amy Tan,
who has had several bestselling novels, one of which was made into a movie,
The Joy Luck Club (Putnam’s 1989). See Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 310.
[31] See, e.g., Michael Awkward,
who was a doctoral student in English from the University of Pennsylvania and
is currently the Director of the Center for the Study of Black Literature and
Culture at the same university. Id. at 301–02.
[32] Otto Santa Ana is a sociolinguist,
Associate Professor, and a founder of the César Chávez Center
for Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCLA. Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 308–09.
[33] See, e.g., Gloria Anzaldúa’s
quote at the end of Part II, “If you want to really hurt me, talk badly
about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity, I am
my language.” Id. at 107.
[34] Michael Awkward marvels at
a University of Pennsylvania professor who moves between speaking in “King’s
English and hood dialect.” Michael Awkward, Learning to Trust the
Language I Thought I’d Left Behind, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 190–91. See also Tan, supra note 18,
at 169–73.
[35] Veary, supra note 17, at 179–83; Delphine Red Shirt, Lakota
Words, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 174–77 (discussing Hawaiian and
Lakota, respectively, as dying languages due to lack of use).
[36] José Antonio Burciaga’s
[hereinafter, Burciaga] “Bilingual Love Poem” integrates Spanish
and English words within one poem. Burciaga, Bilingual Cognates, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 187.
[37] Burciaga, Chief Wachuseh, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 184–85 (dealing with words borrowed from one language by another;
e.g., Spanish and Yiddish).
[38] Burciaga discusses dialectical
variations in Spanish. Id. Awkward, supra note 34, at 190, discusses different dialects of
English.
[39] See, e.g., William Labov, Academic
Ignorance and Black Intelligence, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 134–51 (dispelling the fallacy that some dialects are intrinsically
“better” than others, and showing that these are merely social
judgments).
[40] Pidgins are “a simplified
fusion” of two languages “[n]ative to none of its speakers, a .
. . mixed language, incorporating elements of its users’ native languages
but with less complex grammar and fewer words than either parent language.
A pidgin language emerges to facilitate communication between speakers who
do not share a language; it becomes a creole language when it takes root and
becomes the primary tongue among its users,” at which point it also develops
grammatical features and a larger vocabulary. Rickford, supra note 20, at 240.
[41] “this man didn’t
give my grandpa/ an application because he was stupid, he said,/ because he
was ignorant and inferior,/ and that moment/ cut me in two torturous pieces/
screaming my grandpa was a lovely man/ that this government farm office clerk
was a rude beast—/ and I saw my grandpa’s eyes go dark/ with wound-hurts,
regret, remorse/ that his grandchild would witness/ him humiliated.” Jimmy
Santiago Baca, From Healing Earthquakes, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 166, 166–68.
[42] Tan, supra note 18, at 171.
[43] Michele M. Serros, Mi Problema, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 268–69.
[44] Gloria Anzaldúa, Linguistic
Terrorism, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 270–71.
[45] See, e.g., the summary
of Regents of the University of California v. Allan Bakke, 438 U.S. 912 (1978)
which sounds as if the main holding of the case were to severely limit affirmative
action. The case did define acceptable and unacceptable ways to practice affirmative
action (mainly by disallowing quotas), but its principal legacy is that it upheld affirmative
action as constitutional. Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 102.
[46] The one part of the book that
falls short of being well balanced between the broad groups of language minorities
is the chronology in the second part. It focuses largely on Chicano/Latino/a
and Native American history, leaving out some major pertinent events and legislation
addressed at Asian Americans and African Americans. There is no mention of
the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, or California’s
history of anti-immigration laws specific to or targeting Asians, which were
especially prevalent in the late 1800s and early 1900s. See, e.g., Frank
H. Wu, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White 92 (Basic Books 2002).
Similarly, the information relating to African Americans prior to the Brown-era
is sparse.
[47] “English-only instruction
restricts the range of pedagogical methods available to teachers. This ideology
also insists that dialects, such as Chicano English, African American English,
Neoriquen English, American Indian English, Native Hawaiian English, working-class
white English dialects, among others—all legitimate dialects of home
communities—must be cut out of the children’s mouths to advance
their education.” Otto Santa Ana, Introduction to Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 3, 1–8. I would also include rural white dialects.
[48] Richard Rodriguez, Aria, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 34–39.
[49] School Accountability Report
Card for 2002-2003, Davis Joint Unified School District, César Chávez
Elementary School, available at http://www.djusd.k12.ca.us/District/schools/elementary.shtml (click
on “English” under César Chávez for a pdf file of
the report).
[50] Serros, supra note 43, at 268.
[51] Id. at 269.
[52] Lucas et al., supra note
21, at 202–03.
[53] Id. at 203–04.
[54] Id. at 206 (emphasis
added).
[55] See Serros, supra note 43, at 268–69.
[56] Teachers should “make
their teaching more relevant by incorporating the students’ funds of
knowledge into their lessons.” Luis Moll and Norma González, Beginning
Where the Children Are, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1, at 153, 152–56.
[57] “Provide a balanced and
integrated approach to the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading,
and writing.” Virginia Collier, Teaching Multilingual Children, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 234, 222–35.
[58] “Establish academic support
programs that help language-minority students make the transition from ESL
and bilingual classes to mainstream classes and prepare them to go to college.” Lucas
et al., supra note 21, at 208.
[59] Id. at 206–08.
[60] Collier, supra note 57, at 229.
[61] Middlebury College Language
Schools, available at http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/ls (last
visited Jan. 12, 2005).
[62] Middlebury College Language
Schools, The Language Pledge, available at http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/ls/pledge/ (last
visited Jan. 12, 2005).
[63] Sedaris, supra note
2, at 71–74.
[64] See, e.g., Guadalupe
Valdés, The Failure to Educate Immigrant Children, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 1,
at 111–17.
[65] See, e.g., Lucas et
al., supra note 21, at 202–04.
[66] Delpit, supra note 20, at 242–48.
[67] Rickford, supra note 20, at 236.
[68] Id.
[69] Id.
[70] “In January 1997, at
the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, my colleagues and
I unanimously approved a resolution describing Ebonics as ‘systematic
and rule-governed like all natural speech varieties.’ Moreover, we agreed
that the Oakland resolution was ‘linguistically and pedagogically sound.’” Id.
[71] In an Aurora University study,
inner city African American students were taught for eleven weeks using the
new method (“contrasting features”) or the conventional method
(“correction”). At the end of this time period, the students taught
with the new method showed a 59% reduction in their use of Ebonics features
in their writing, while those taught with the conventional method actually
showed an 8.5% increase in use of Ebonics in their writing. Id. at
240–41.
[72] Delpit, supra note 20, at 242.
[73] Id. at 242–43.
[74] Id. at 243.
[75] Id.
[76] “Topic-centered” narratives
are “stories focused on one event.” Id. at 245.
[77] “Episodic” narratives
are
“stories that include shifting scenes and are typically longer.” Id.
[78] Id.
[79] Id.
[80] “Here go a table for Here
is a table.” Id. at 246.
[81] “Here is a dog for There
is a dog.” Id.
[82] Id. at 247.
[83] Tan, supra note 18, at 169–73.
[84] Id. at 170.
[85] Id. at 170, 173.
[86] Id. at 169.
[87] Id. at 170.
[88] Id. at 172–73.
[89] See generally W. Edward
Curley
& Alicia P. Schmitt, Revising SAT-Verbal Items to Eliminate Differential
Item Functioning, No. ETS-RR-93-61 (College Board Publications, 1993) (evaluating
factors that contribute to test items’ differential impact on minority
groups as compared with white males) available at http://www.collegeboard.com/research/abstract/3830.html (on
file with the Harvard Latino Law Review).
[90] Id. at 173.
[91] Burciaga, Bilingual Cognates, in Tongue-Tied, supra note 35,
at 187.
[92] Advertisers in many European
countries (such as Sweden and Germany) can rely on a somewhat bilingual general
public in crafting their slogans and ads, because all students in the school
system must learn some English in addition to the language commonly used in
the country. In Germany, during the summer of 1996, just before the Atlanta
Olympics there was a McDonald’s billboard with Olympic rings that said “You
ess, eh!” (USA). The advertisement only gets its message across if the
reader understands both English and German: the reader must know that “you”
is the equivalent of “du” or “Sie” in German (i.e.,
the one who is reading the sign) and that “you ess eh” is how USA
is pronounced in English (in German it is “oo ess ah”). The reader
must also know that “ess” is German for “eat.” The
advertisement cleverly connected the idea of Germans frequenting an American
eatery with the Olympic fever of the summer.
[93] I include English “z” sounds
with “s” as they are very similar: a “z” sound is made
in the mouth exactly the way an “s” is, the only difference being
that a “z” sound adds vocal cord vibration (voicing). See, e.g.,
Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, Table 7.5 “Phonemic Features of
American English Consonants,” in An Introduction to Language,
275 (6th ed. 1998).
[94] “Bilingual love” could
be love expressed bilingually, or love for bilingualism.
Copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Harvard Latino Law Review - Volume 8, Spring 2005
Comments and questions? Please contact us
Last modified: December 22, 2006.