Comments on: The Bilingual Trap

By: aspacia

aspacia — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 23:59:35 +0000

Okay, what do we do with 16 year olds who are enrolled in High School English classes, and are taught and expected to produce the same results as the native speakers. Any ideas.

By: Nick Shaw

Nick Shaw — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:42:35 +0000

It's funny that an article 13 years old still descibes the stance of teacher's unions and liberals. Not that I expected much change but, adopting policies proven to work goes against the grain of keeping them (by "them" I mean individual groups divided by race, colour or ethnicity) on their own particular reservation and more easily managed.

By: RobertPinkerton

RobertPinkerton — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:44:09 +0000

Excuse an old man's naievete, but I thought that part of the bargain of permanently settling in another country was to adjoin oneself to its People (Capitalized to indicate the equivalent of the Russian Narod or the Greek ethnos; including at the head of the list, learning the local dominant language). It used to be that one could tell that a person was a foreigner, if he was educated, by his use of the academic high tongue dialect, and the "dictionary words" thereof. In this light, the situation of a neighbor of mine is interesting. My neighbor's father, from Puerto Rico, still speaks minimal English. My neighbor speaks both English (polite colloquial) and Spanish (both Puerto Rican dialect and academic high tongue) but with a Puerto Rican accent, both fluently. My neighbor's son, recent college entrant, speaks English with no accent and Spanish with an American accent.