Hello, Ni Hao, Hola, Bonjour, and greetings to all in whatever language(s) you speak or are learning. Welcome to the Speaking In Tongues blog! I am the mother of two kids learning Mandarin at a San Francisco public school. My older son—who already holds his own in casual conversation and gets compliments on his accent every time he speaks Mandarin—is about to start second grade, and his little brother will begin kindergarten in August. Being their mother has, of course, brought me amazing experiences every day since they were born, but the budding bilingualism is making things more interesting all the time. Their father and I speak no Chinese beyond what our older son has taught us (and he doesn’t hesitate to criticize our attempts at pronunciation), and since he learned to spell, our only recourse to private conversation in front of our children has been pig Latin.
The tables are about to turn!
When we decided to enroll our kids in a language immersion program, we just thought we were taking advantage of a wonderful opportunity. We didn’t realize until watching the premiere of Speaking in Tongues at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2009 that we were trailblazers on a controversial path.
I have always felt extremely fortunate to live in a city that has not only the political support to provide immersion options in public education but also the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity to support language acquisition outside the classroom. Parents in other parts of the country who want this opportunity for their children have a much harder road to travel. Still, more schools, both public and private, are taking advantage of parent interest in immersion and the brain’s remarkable ability to learn languages at an early age. Programs in languages as diverse as Navajo, Russian, Hebrew, Hawaiian, Arabic, Korean, and more are increasing in areas from New York City to the Navajo Nation.
As the popularity of early second-language instruction increases, anti-immigrant sentiment, the English-only movement, and measures such as the controversial Arizona law SB 1070 are also making regular headlines. It is unclear how immersion programs will ultimately be affected by the No Child Left Behind mandate and Race to the Top incentive program, and many parents, though excited about their children learning a second language, are understandably concerned that their learning and literacy in English and other core subjects may suffer as a result of the immersion environment.
In this blog we hope to explore the excitement and the controversy of immersion education and second language acquisition in children. We will write about research and politics, trends and tendencies. With guest bloggers and voices of experience throughout the language education community, we hope to stimulate conversation about this very important topic and to provide a forum for parents, teachers, students, administrators, politicians, psychologists and other experts in the field of early language acquisition to share their perspectives. We hope you will come here often to explore the world that is opening up as an unprecedented number of US schoolchildren are opening to the world by learning to communicate in a language other than English.
