[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Effects of Bilingualism on the education system
The landscape of bilingual education in the United States has become a familiar one over the last 20 years. The struggle for equity in education has continued since the inception of the first bilingual education program in the 1960s in Dade County, southern Florida, where Cuban Americans won the battle for Spanish-language instruction for their children. Funding for bilingual education programs in U.S. public schools was first authorized in 1965 under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The purpose of these programs was to meet the needs of what were considered "educationally deprived children" who did not speak English as their first language. The intent was to teach these children subject matter in a language that they understood, while gradually teaching them English until they were able to make the transition to all-English instruction.
Multiple research studies have documented the success of high-quality bilingual instruction in promoting academic achievement as well as literacy among students in both English and the native language.
Bilingualism is associated with groups with less social prestige. Children who grow up in middle-class homes where two languages are spoken initially treat the two languages as a single system, but they rapidly separate the two languages. The commonly held fear that early simultaneous bilingualism causes retardation in language finds little support in data.
The bilingual uses his or her two languages as an interdependent system. Knowledge that is acquired in one language readily transfers to the other. However, “the bilingual is also able to remember the particular language in which events occurred” (Chamot, A., & El-Dinary, P., 1999).
The type of community in which a person becomes bilingual does not seem to affect the structure of his or her cognitive system. There is little evidence to support the notion that different kinds of bilinguals are produced by different kinds of exposure................
