Lydia Breiseth is Manager of Colorín Colorado, a bilingual website serving parents and educators of English language learners based at public broadcasting station WETA in Washington, DC. The following is a guest post inspired by her conversations with SIT filmmaker Ken Schneider and some of the subjects from Speaking In Tongues.
by Lydia Breiseth
We recently had the opportunity to interview Ken Schneider, co-director of Speaking in Tongues, for the bilingual English language learner (ELL) website Colorín Colorado. Ken provided a great behind-the-scenes glimpse of the film’s production process, as well as some thoughtful insight on attitudes towards dual-language education around the country.
One of the words that Ken used has stuck with me as I think about ELLs who enroll in dual-language programs: courage. Courage, he says, is what enabled José and Maria Patiño, a humble couple with little education, to put their son Jason in a two-way Spanish immersion program rather than send him to school in an English-only environment. In the film, José notes that it would be difficult for him and Maria if their son lost his Spanish as the lines of communication would be broken – but that’s not their only motivation in enrolling him in a dual-immersion program. Maria expresses her hopes her son will be “better prepared when he is older, to find a better job and have twice as many opportunities because he speaks two languages.”
For most families like the Patiños, the overwhelming pressure to learn English is communicated in the schools and by the mainstream media. We meet a Latino father in the film who believes that his daughter is speaking too much Spanish at her dual-language program; his impassioned plea at a parent meeting for his daughter to learn more English underscores the desire that so many immigrant parents share to see their children succeed in the U.S. It also underscores the limited access that parents have to information about the benefits of building strong language and literacy skills in the first language, and the many kinds of benefits (academic, social, emotional, and cultural) of effective dual-language programs.
For the families that don’t have access to that information when high-quality dual-language programs are offered in their school district , questions arise about which language to use at home. Sometimes Spanish-speaking parents stop reading to their children since they can’t read aloud in English. Parents may see their native language as an obstacle rather than an asset, sacrificing the family’s communication in the name of their child’s success and thus creating a rift as the child grows older and speaks less Spanish.
This is an important part of the conversation that Speaking in Tongues has inspired: What does it mean for our ELLs to succeed? Does it mean fluency in English, even if it’s at the expense of the native language (as we see in the case of Kelly’s parents)? Or does it mean giving our children the chance to become fully bi-literate and bilingual? While many of their counterparts understandably choose the former, the Patiños chose the latter. So far Jason’s prospects for a future with “twice as many opportunities” – and one in which his parents can play an active part – look bright. When the film was released in 2009, Jason was testing well-above grade level in English and Spanish, and he has identified the college he plans to attend.
José and Maria are parents whose courage we can learn from as we look to our rapidly-changing student population around the country. We need Jason to succeed, and we need José and Maria to be there alongside him every step of the way.
Special thanks to Dr. Karen Ford from the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and Giselle Lundy-Ponce from the American Federation of Teachers for their contributions to this post.
