Growing up my mom always yelled at my brother and I for two things: chewing with our mouths open, and using words like “ain’t”. I would always get annoyed when she corrected me. I did not understand why these things were a problem. If I wanted to chew loudly or with my mouth open, why couldn’t I? If I wanted to speak improperly like the kids I hung out with on the street, why couldn’t I? I never thought that I would one day adopt these qualities I hated so much.
This is what Min-Zhan Lu’s piece reminded me of. How no matter how much we resist our parents qualities or the qualities of our peers we somehow end up adopting them because we are constantly immersed in them.
She tried her hardest to compartmentalize her two languages. Then she tried to follow her school language, but she found that she couldn’t because it was a part of her conscious and her subconscious. She could not really control the switches that turned each section of thinking on and so she would use both her home and school language at once, because they were what shaped her identity.
I am not fluent in a language other than English. I was not really exposed to any foreign languages until high school, and so I cannot fully connect with Min-Zhan Lu’s struggle as a child. I can, however, say that I am in favor of teaching children a second language young. Min-Zhan Lu mentions at the end that her daughter learned English, her second language, easily. Lu also took to English, and the two forms of Chinese that she was taught easily. Children learn languages easier than adults.
I am currently in Intro to Linguistics, and my professor proposed the question of how to approach teaching a second language to children. Which one do you speak at home? Do you speak both at home? What do you speak at school? It was hard to think of answers for these questions. I’d always assumed that learning a second language would be strictly taught in school, but what about children who come to the US and are learning English as a second language? Should parents only speak their native language at home or should they try to speak English or both?
Lu’s parents spoke strictly English and in their bourgeois terms. They did not mix languages except in possible helping with homework. This made things more difficult for her to decide which “side” she agreed with. We have read several pieces in this class that suggest that schools do not support students speaking their native languages in school, so how would a student deal with this? How would a teacher support this? I think this goes long with questions I have asked before; where the answer lies somewhere in the responsibility for fostering success lies with both teachers and parents.
When I consider this question, I don’t think it matters so much what parents and teachers choose to do–either fully immerse a child in one particular language or use both the native language as well as the second language–so long as both these instructional powers are consistent with what has been decided. Responsibility does lie with both parents and teachers, and these influences need to be united in what they’re doing.
Last year I read Richard Rodriguez’s memoir Hunger of Memory, which details his growing up as a Mexican American and the issues he had with assimilation. He grew up in a Mexican community in California, but attended an all white, English-speaking school. When he was in first grade he was behind his peers in reading and writing skills, so a group of nuns from the school went to his parents and asked that they only use English at home to speak to Richard so he can practice the skills he learns at school. The problem was that his parents couldn’t speak English at all, they had an interpreter come for the meeting with the nuns. The parents wanted to do what was best for Richard, so they decided not to speak Spanish with him.
For about two years, Richard was in a terrible position where he couldn’t communicate with anyone–his parents wouldn’t use Spanish with him, to the extent of not speaking with him at all, and he wasn’t fluent enough in English to converse with anyone at school. As he gained English fluency, he lost his ability to speak Spanish, which was encouraged by the school.
While the nuns’ strategy worked–Richard learned to read, write, and fluently speak English, one can’t help but wonder the damage caused by demonizing Spanish. The nuns didn’t want Richard’s parents to speak English, so much as they didn’t want them to speak Spanish; they wanted to eliminate all use of Spanish around Richard rather than integrating English into his knowledge of language.
If the school and Richard’s parents had come to an equitable agreement about how to support Richard’s learning of English, his parents could have been much more involved in his schooling than they were simply by restricting their speech. It’s critical to have parents a part of the learning process, but Richard’s parents were branded a detriment because the school refused to see Spanish as an equally valuable language.