American Pie: English As She Is Spoke - Or Not
...So given that we, as a nation, don’t attach much importance to correct, understandable English, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that we don’t insist on it for our immigrants. The belief is sometimes expressed that America will ultimately separate into several countries along ethnic lines. That California and the west coast states will become an Asian nation, Texas and Florida Hispanic, and so on. The absence of a strong, unifying, national language is one sure way to facilitate that...
John Merchant says that while the US adopts a laissez faire approach to what, in his opinion, should be the national language, the rest of the world is moving towards English as being the universal tongue for diplomacy, business, science and education.
To read more of John's well-argued and enjoyable columns please click on American Pie in the menu on this page.
The debate in the USA that really isn’t a debate, about whether fluency in English should be a mandatory condition of citizenship, drizzles on. It isn’t strictly a debate because the sides never really engage across the nation. There’s a meeting here, a conference there, a political candidate takes up the issue as part of his/her platform, and so on, but no really substantive position is adopted by either the pros or the cons, and certainly not by the government.
Meanwhile, state and local governments are, ad hoc, enabling non-English speaking immigrants to avoid having even a rudimentary working knowledge of the language. Signs in public places and retail stores are bi-lingual, multilingual employees who have to deal with the public are prized by municipalities and government offices, and the first question most telephone menus ask is whether you wish to proceed in English or Español.
Young children who emigrate with their parents or those who are born here can rapidly become fluent, but then the parents often use them as interpreters, and thus avoid the necessity of becoming fluent in English themselves. I say this having just attended a social event where few of the ten or fifteen adults spoke English, but where even the youngest child was capable of carrying on a meaningful conversation.
In the educational system, the older children and adults need to be targeted. In the absence of any national standard, other than the, much criticized, “No Child Left Behind” program, cities and states are left to set their own educational policy on fluency, and to provide their own solutions. In New Jersey, the educational system with which I am most familiar, there is a confusing mixture of programs.
The elementary level students who are not fluent in English enter what is called an “English as a Second Language” (ESL) course. Teachers in the ESL program speak only English to the students, relying on show and tell techniques to explain what they are saying. The students’ native languages may be different, but the majority is Spanish-speaking, since immigrants from South America and the Caribbean predominate. The students must remain in the program until they are able to speak and write English.
At the college and university level, courses are aimed at those mature students who already possess a degree earned in another country, are not fluent in English, but wish to qualify for professional jobs in the USA such as teaching. They are permitted to study core subjects such as math and history in their native tongue for 2 years, but must then transfer to English speaking classes.
Added to these curricula programs are grant-funded enterprises such as Kean University’s Adelante (Forward) that aims to accelerate the transition from Spanish to English fluency, starting with children of elementary school age. In the background of these endeavors is some discussion about changing the citizenship application from an oral, question and answer, test to a written narrative, but there are opponents to this, the most extreme of which would do away with the test altogether.
At the same time as the US is adopting such a laissez faire approach to what, in my opinion, should be the national language, the rest of the world is moving towards English as being the universal tongue for diplomacy, business, science and education.
This being the case, it’s fair to ask if even the native English speakers in America are fluent in English. Literacy among college graduates declined between 1992 and 2003, with less than one-third of all graduates at the highest “proficient” level in 2003, and less than half of all graduates with advanced degrees at this level.
It’s my observation that, by and large, the American education system does not attach much importance to students’ English abilities. Some years ago I questioned one of my daughter’s teachers on why he had given her an “A” grade for a geography paper that was full of miss-spellings and grammatical errors. He answered that he taught geography, not English, a reply that spoke volumes. In my wife’s classes of graduate and post graduate level students, probably less that ten percent were able to express themselves correctly in writing, and all these students intended to become teachers and school principals.
So given that we, as a nation, don’t attach much importance to correct, understandable English, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that we don’t insist on it for our immigrants. The belief is sometimes expressed that America will ultimately separate into several countries along ethnic lines. That California and the west coast states will become an Asian nation, Texas and Florida Hispanic, and so on. The absence of a strong, unifying, national language is one sure way to facilitate that.
# # #
