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Questions of Language
QUESTIONS OF LANGUAGE
Reading programs taught in English to children with Spanish as a first language waste their acquired linguistic attributes and also impede learning by forcing them to absorb skills of reading simultaneously with a new language.
Bilingual Education: The Key to Basic Skills,
angelo gonzalez
Foreign-language acquisition is one thing for the upper-class child in a convent school learning to curtsy. Language acquisition can only seem a loss for the ghetto child, for the new language is psychologically awesome, being, as it is, the language of the bus driver and Papa’s employer. The child’s difficulty will turn out to be psychological more than linguistic because what he gives up are symbols of home.
Bilingual Education: Outdated and Unrealistic,
richard rodriguez
Why should any words be called obscene? Don’t they all describe natural human functions? Am I trying to tell them, my students demand, that the “strong, earthy, gut-honest”—or, if they are fans of Norman Mailer, the “rich, liberating, existential”—language they use to describe sexual activity isn’t preferable to “phony-sounding,
middle-class words like ‘intercourse’ and ‘copulate’?” “Cop You Late!” they say with
fancy inflections and gagging grimaces. “Now, what is that supposed to mean?
Four-Letter Words Can Hurt You,
barbara lawrence
The first time it happened to me I was nine years old. Cornered in the school bathroom by the class bully and her sidekick, I was offered the opportunity to swallow a few of my teeth unless I satisfactorily explained why I always got good grades, why I talked “proper” or “white.”
What’s Wrong with Black English?
rachel l. jones
h1,angelo gonzalez·bilingual education: the key to basic skillsANGELO GONZALEZ
Bilingual Education: The Key to Basic Skills
Angelo Gonzalez serves as educational director of ASPIRA, an organization that promotes awareness and advocacy of issues related to Hispanic Americans. This essay and the essay by Richard Rodriguez that follows it appeared as companion pieces in the New York Times “Educational Supplement.” Together, these essays suggest the complexity of the bilingual education question.
Suggestions for Prereading or Journal Writing
1.
If you moved to a foreign country and had the choice of attending either a school where classes were taught in your native language or one where classes were conducted in the foreign language, which one would you choose? What problems might you encounter in the school of your choice? What might you learn (or fail to learn)?
2.
Write about a particular educational experience in which you didn’t learn as much as you wanted to. What factors came into play in this experience? How might you have learned more in this situation?
If we accept that a child cannot learn unless taught through the language he speaks and understands; that a child who does not speak or understand English must fall behind when English is the dominant medium of instruction; that one needs to learn English so as to be able to participate in an English-speaking society; that self-esteem and motivation are necessary for effective learning; that rejection of a child’s native language and culture is detrimental to the learning process: then any necessary effective educational program for limited or no English-speaking ability must incorporate the following:
Language arts and comprehensive reading programs taught in the child’s native language.
Curriculum content areas taught in the native language to further comprehension and academic achievement.
Intensive instruction in English.
Use of materials sensitive to and reflecting the culture of children within the program.
Most Important Goal
The mastery of basic reading skills is the most important goal in primary education since reading is the basis for much of all subsequent learning. Ordinarily, these skills are learned at home. But where beginning reading is taught in English, only the English-speaking child profits from these early acquired skills that are prerequisites to successful reading development. Reading programs taught in English to children with Spanish as a first language waste their acquired linguistic attributes and also impede learning by forcing them to absorb skills of reading simultaneously with a new language.
Both local and national research data provide ample evidence for the efficacy of well-implemented programs. The New York City Board of Education Report on Bilingual Pupil Services for 1982–83 indicated that in all areas of the curriculum—English, Spanish and mathematics—and at all grade levels, students demonstrated statistically significant gains in tests of reading in English and Spanish and in math. In all but two of the programs reviewed, the attendance rates of students in the program, ranging from 86 to 94 percent, were higher than those of the general school population. Similar higher attendance rates were found among students in high school bilingual programs.
At Yale University, Kenji Hakuta, a linguist, reported recently on a study of working-class Hispanic students in the New Haven bilingual program. He found that children who were the most bilingual, that is, who developed English without the loss of Spanish, were brighter in both verbal and nonverbal tests. Over time, there was an increasing correlation between English and Spanish—a finding that clearly contradicts the charge that teaching in the home language is detrimental to English. Rather the two languages are interdependent within the bilingual child, reinforcing each other.
Essential Contribution
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As Jim Cummins of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education has argued, the use and development of the native language makes an essential contribution to the development of minority children’s subject-matter knowledge and academic learning potential. In fact, at least three national data bases—the National Assessment of Educational Progress, National Center for Educational Statistics–High School and Beyond Studies, and the Survey of Income and Education—suggest that there are long-term positive effects among high school students who have participated in bilingual-education programs. These students are achieving higher scores on tests of verbal and mathematics skills.
These and similar findings buttress the argument stated persuasively in the recent joint recommendation of the Academy for Educational Development and the Hazen Foundation, namely, that America needs to become a more multilingual nation and children who speak a non-English language are a national resource to be nurtured in school.
Unfortunately, the present Administration’s educational policies would seem to be leading us in the opposite direction. Under the guise of protecting the common language of public life in the United States, William J. Bennett, the Secretary of Education, unleashed a frontal attack on bilingual education. In a major policy address, he engaged in rhetorical distortions about the nature and effectiveness of bilingual programs, pointing only to unnamed negative research findings to justify the Administration’s retrenchment efforts.
Arguing for the need to give local school districts greater flexibility in determining appropriate methodologies in serving limited-English-proficient students, Mr. Bennett fails to realize that, in fact, districts serving large numbers of language-minority students, as is the case in New York City, do have that flexibility. Left to their own devices in implementing legal mandates, many school districts have performed poorly at providing services to all entitled language-minority students.
A Harsh Reality
The harsh reality in New York City for language-minority students was documented comprehensively last month by the Educational Priorities Panel. The panel’s findings revealed that of the 113,831 students identified as being limited in English proficiency, as many as 44,000 entitled students are not receiving any bilingual services. The issue at hand is, therefore, not one of choice but rather violation of the rights of almost 40 percent of language-minority children to equal educational opportunity. In light of these findings the Reagan Administration’s recent statements only serve to exacerbate existing inequities in the American educational system for linguistic-minority children. Rather than adding fuel to a misguided debate, the Administration would serve these children best by insuring the full funding of the 1984 Bilingual Education Reauthorization Act as passed by the Congress.
Suggestions for Writing and Discussion
In your own words and in one sentence only, what is Gonzalez’s central point in this essay?
List and evaluate the specific sources Gonzalez uses in order to support his thesis. How credible are these sources? How reliable are they? How varied and up to date are they?
3.
In this essay, Gonzalez chooses to appeal to the reader’s sense of logic, for the most part. First of all, why do you think he adopts this rhetorical approach? Second, for what specific readers might this approach be most effective? Explain your answers.
4.
Gonzalez claims that “children who speak a non-English language are a national resource to be nurtured in school.” However, he does not provide specifics as to how this should be done. If you were an elementary school teacher, what specifically could you do in order to nurture these children?
5.
Gonzalez writes that bilingual education is not a matter of choice: It is a matter of rights. On what principle does he base this claim? Do you agree or disagree with his position here? Explain your answer.
Suggestion for Extended Thinking and Writing
Call several schools in your area to learn whether bilingual education is a concern. If it is, discover how they approach this issue. Talk with a variety of people in the schools: teachers, principals, even students. Also, research your state and local school offices in order to discover what the existing policy is on bilingual education. Write a report on your findings and share it with your class.
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ
Bilingual Education: Outdated and Unrealistic
Born to Mexican immigrant parents in 1944, Richard Rodriguez experienced painful conflicts between speaking Spanish—his “home” language—and speaking English—the “public” language expected from him at school. He resolved these conflicts by speaking, reading, and writing English nearly exclusively from his elementary school years onward. After graduating from Stanford University, he earned a graduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and later became a professor of Renaissance literature at Berkeley. Best known for his autobiography, Hunger of Memory (1982), Rodriguez has written extensively about issues related to bilingual learning.
Have you ever experienced a conflict between what you learned at home and what you encountered in the classroom at school? If so, describe the conflict and explain how you resolved it, or discuss why you believe the conflict remains unresolved.
If you are bilingual (or multilingual), explain the benefits as well as any drawbacks you see in knowing more than one language. If you are not bilingual (or multilingual), talk with someone who is, asking this person about the advantages and disadvantages of knowing two or more languages. Then explain your response to what you have learned.
How shall we teach the dark-eyed child ingles? The debate continues much as it did two decades ago.
Bilingual education belongs to the 1960’s, the years of the black civil rights movement. Bilingual education became the official Hispanic demand; as a symbol, the English-only classroom was intended to be analogous to the segregated lunch counter; the locked school door. Bilingual education was endorsed by judges and, of course, by politicians well before anyone knew the answer to the question: Does bilingual education work?
Who knows? Quien sabe?
The official drone over bilingual education is conducted by educationalists with numbers and charts. Because bilingual education was never simply a matter of pedagogy, it is too much to expect educators to resolve the matter. Proclamations concerning bilingual education are weighted at bottom with Hispanic political grievances and, too, with middle-class romanticism.
No one will say it in public; in private, Hispanics argue with me about bilingual education and every time it comes down to memory. Everyone remembers going to that grammar school where students were slapped for speaking Spanish. Childhood memory is offered as parable; the memory is meant to compress the gringo’s long history of offenses against Spanish, Hispanic culture, Hispanics.
It is no coincidence that, although all of America’s ethnic groups are implicated in the policy of bilingual education, Hispanics, particularly Mexican-Americans, have been its chief advocates. The English words used by Hispanics in support of bilingual education are words such as “dignity,” “heritage,” “culture.” Bilingualism becomes a way of exacting from gringos a grudging admission of contrition—for the 19th-century theft of the Southwest, the relegation of Spanish to a foreign tongue, the injustice of history. At the extreme, Hispanic bilingual enthusiasts demand that public schools “maintain” a student’s sense of separateness.
Hispanics may be among the last groups of Americans who still believe in the 1960’s. Bilingual-education proposals still serve the romance of that decade, especially of the late 60’s, when the heroic black civil rights movement grew paradoxically wedded to its opposite—the ethnic revival movement. Integration and separatism merged into twin, possible goals.
With integration, the black movement inspired middle-class Americans to imitations—the Hispanic movement; the Gray Panthers; feminism; gay rights. Then there was withdrawal, with black glamour leading a romantic retreat from the anonymous crowd.
Americans came to want it both ways. They wanted in and they wanted out. Hispanics took to celebrating their diversity, joined other Americans in dancing rings around the melting pot.
Mythic Metaphors
10
More intently than most, Hispanics wanted the romance of their dual cultural allegiance backed up by law. Bilingualism became proof that one could have it both ways, could be a full member of public America and yet also separate, privately Hispanic. “Spanish” and “English” became mythic metaphors like country and city, describing separate islands of private and public life. Ballots, billboards, and, of course, classrooms in Spanish. For nearly two decades now, middle-class Hispanics have had it their way. They have foisted a neat ideological scheme on working-class children. What they want to believe about themselves, they wait for the child to prove, that it is possible to be two, that one can assume the public language (the public life) of America, even while remaining what one was, existentially separate.
Adulthood is not so neatly balanced. The tension between public and private life is intrinsic to adulthood—certainly middle-class adulthood. Usually the city wins because the city pays. We are mass people for more of the day than we are with our intimates. No Congressional mandate or Supreme Court decision can diminish the loss.
I was talking the other day to a carpenter from Riga, in the Soviet Republic of Latvia. He has been here six years. He told me of his having to force himself to relinquish the “luxury” of reading books in Russian or Latvian so he could begin to read books in English. And the books he was able to read in English were not of a complexity to satisfy him. But he was not going back to Riga.
Beyond any question of pedagogy there is the simple fact that a language gets learned as it gets used, fills one’s mouth, one’s mind, with the new names for things.
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The civil rights movement of the 1960’s taught Americans to deal with forms of discrimination other than economic—racial, sexual. We forget class. We talk about bilingual education as an ethnic issue; we forget to notice that the program mainly touches the lives of working-class immigrant children. Foreign-language acquisition is one thing for the upper-class child in a convent school learning to curtsy. Language acquisition can only seem a loss for the ghetto child, for the new language is psychologically awesome, being, as it is, the language of the bus driver and Papa’s employer. The child’s difficulty will turn out to be psychological more than linguistic because what he gives up are symbols of home.
Pain and Guilt
I was that child! I faced the stranger’s English with pain and guilt and fear. Baptized to English in school, at first I felt myself drowning—the ugly sounds forced down my throat—until slowly, slowly (held in the tender grip of my teachers), suddenly the conviction took; English was my language to use.
What I yearn for is some candor from those who speak about bilingual education. Which of its supporters dares speak of the price a child pays—the price of adulthood—to make the journey from a working-class home into a middle-class schoolroom? The real story, the silent story of the immigrant child’s journey is one of embarrassments in public; betrayal of all that is private; silence at home; and at school the hand tentatively raised.
Bilingual enthusiasts bespeak an easier world. They seek a linguistic solution to a social dilemma. They seem to want to believe that there is an easy way for the child to balance private and public, in order to believe that there is some easy way for themselves.
Ten years ago, I started writing about the ideological implications of bilingual education. Ten years from now some newspaper may well invite me to contribute another Sunday supplement essay on the subject. The debate is going to continue. The bilingual establishment is now inside the door. Jobs are at stake. Politicians can only count heads; growing numbers of Hispanics will insure the compliance of politicians.
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Publicly, we will continue the fiction. We will solemnly address this issue as an educational question, a matter of pedagogy. But privately, Hispanics will still seek from bilingual education an admission from the gringo that Spanish has value and presence. Hispanics of middle class will continue to seek the romantic assurance of separateness. Experts will argue. Dark-eyed children will sit in the classroom. Mute.
How does Rodriguez’s basic contention differ from Gonzalez’s main point (see “Bilingual Education,” pages 453–455)?
Gonzalez appeals primarily to the reader’s reason. What appeal(s) does Rodriguez choose in this piece? Find five specific words, phrases, or passages that support your answer; and go on to explain how each phrase affected you as a reader.
Gonzalez’s use of local and national test results seems convincing, and yet Rodriguez claims that we still don’t know whether or not bilingual education works. Why isn’t he convinced by these statistics? Do you agree with him? Explain.
Although both Rodriguez and Gonzalez are members of Hispanic cultures, their goals for the education of Hispanic children differ. Explain the goals that each writer promotes in his piece, and draw some inferences about what is at the core of their disagreement.
In a public school, should a child be entitled to his or her native language in the classroom? Support your position with three convincing reasons, and address opposing viewpoints as part of your argument.
6.
After reading both Rodriguez’s and Gonzalez’s essays, which approach do you feel would be most effective for residents in your community or in a community nearby that has a significant bilingual population? In your answer, explain how several specific points the author makes might connect with the characteristics specific to your community.
Many countries—for example, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland—have more than one official language. In addition, in many countries students learn at least one other language (often English) in addition to their country’s official language(s). Do research on the language education in these countries and then argue for or against the following proposition: “Every student in the United States should be required to become fluent both in English and in at least one other language.”
BARBARA LAWRENCE
Four-Letter Words Can Hurt You
Barbara Lawrence is a professor of language and literature at the State University of New York, Old Westbury. She has written extensively on questions of language, particularly from a feminist perspective. This essay first appeared as an Op Ed piece in the New York Times in 1973.
List all of the terms you can think of that men use in referring to women. Similarly, list all of the terms you can think of that women use when referring to men. Compare these two lists and come to some conclusions: What do men who use certain terms really think of women, and what do women who use certain terms think of men?
What five words in the English language do you find most offensive? Can you think of a situation in which these words would not be offensive to you? Explain.
Why should any words be called obscene? Don’t they all describe natural human functions? Am I trying to tell them, my students demand, that the “strong, earthy, gut-honest”—or, if they are fans of Norman Mailer, the “rich, liberating, existential”—language they use to describe sexual activity isn’t preferable to “phony-sounding, middle-class words like ‘intercourse’ and ‘copulate’?” “Cop You Late!” they say with fancy inflections and gagging grimaces. “Now, what is that supposed to mean?”
Well, what is it supposed to mean? And why indeed should one group of words describing human functions and human organs be acceptable in ordinary conversation and another, describing presumably the same organs and functions, be tabooed—so much so, in fact, that some of these words still cannot appear in print in many parts of the English-speaking world?
The argument that these taboos exist only because of “sexual hangups” (middle-class, middle-age, feminist), or even that they are a result of class oppression (the contempt of the Norman conquerors for the language of their Anglo-Saxon serfs), ignores a much more likely explanation, it seems to me, and that is the sources and functions of the words themselves.
The best known of the tabooed sexual verbs, for example, comes from the German ficken, meaning “to strike”; combined, according to Partridge’s etymological dictionary Origins, with the Latin sexual verb futuere; associated in turn with the Latin fustis, “a staff or cudgel”; the Celtic buc, “a point, hence to pierce”; the Irish bot, “the male member”; the Latin battuere, “to beat”; the Gaelic batair, “a cudgeller”; the Early Irish bualaim, “I strike”; and so forth. It is one of what etymologists sometimes call “the sadistic group of words for the man’s part in copulation.”
The brutality of this word, then, and its equivalents (“screw,” “bang,” etc.), is not an illusion of the middle class or a crotchet of Women’s Liberation. In their origins and imagery these words carry undeniably painful, if not sadistic, implications, the object of which is almost always female. Consider, for example, what a “screw” actually does to the wood it penetrates; what a painful, even mutilating, activity this kind of analogy suggests. “Screw” is particularly interesting in this context, since the noun, according to Partridge, comes from words meaning “groove,” “nut,” “ditch,” “breeding sow,” “scrofula” and “swelling,” while the verb, besides its explicit imagery, has antecedent associations to “write on,” “scratch,” “scarify,” and so forth—a revealing fusion of a mechanical or painful action with an obviously denigrated object.
Not all obscene words, of course, are as implicitly sadistic or denigrating to women as these, but all that I know seem to serve a similar purpose: to reduce the human organism (especially the female organism) and human functions (especially sexual and procreative) to their least organic, most mechanical dimension; to substitute a trivializing or deforming resemblance for the complex human reality of what is being described.
Tabooed male descriptives, when they are not openly denigrating to women, often serve to divorce a male organ or function from any significant interaction with the female. Take the word “testes,” for example, suggesting “witnesses” (from the Latin testis) to the sexual and procreative strengths of the male organ; and the obscene counterpart of this word, which suggests little more than a mechanical shape. Or compare almost any of the “rich,” “liberating” sexual verbs, so fashionable today among male writers, with that much-derided Latin word “copulate” (“to bind or join together”) or even that Anglo-Saxon phrase (which seems to have had no trouble surviving the Norman Conquest) “make love.”
How arrogantly self-involved the tabooed words seem in comparison to either of the other terms, and how contemptuous of the female partner. Understandably so, of course, if she is only a “skirt,” a “broad,” a “chick,” a “pussycat” or a “piece.” If she is, in other words, no more than her skirt, or what her skirt conceals; no more than a breeder, or the broadest part of her; no more than a piece of human being or a “piece of tail.”
The most severely tabooed of all the female descriptives, incidentally, are those like a “piece of tail,” which suggest (either explicitly or through antecedents) that there is no significant difference between the female channel through which we are all conceived and born and the anal outlet common to both sexes—a distinction that pornographers have always enjoyed obscuring.
This effort to deny women their biological identity, their individuality, their humanness, is such an important aspect of obscene language that one can only marvel at how seldom, in an era preoccupied with definitions of obscenity, this fact is brought to our attention. One problem, of course, is that many of the people in the best position to do this (critics, teachers, writers) are so reluctant today to admit that they are angered or shocked by obscenity. Bored, maybe, unimpressed, aesthetically displeased, but—no matter how brutal or denigrating the material—never angered, never shocked.
And yet how eloquently angered, how piously shocked many of these same people become if denigrating language is used about any minority group other than women; if the obscenities are racial or ethnic, that is, rather than sexual. Words like “coon,” “kike,” “spic,” “wop,” after all, deform identity, deny individuality and humanness in almost exactly the same way that sexual vulgarisms and obscenities do.
No one that I know, least of all my students, would fail to question the values of a society whose literature and entertainment rested heavily on racial or ethnic pejoratives. Are the values of a society whose literature and entertainment rest as heavily as ours on sexual pejoratives any less questionable?
Barbara Lawrence’s piece was first published in 1973. Is this topic more or less relevant in terms of life in the 1990s? Support your answer with specifics.
Lawrence argues that words should be considered obscene on the basis of their original sources and their functions. First, explain what she means by “source” and “function.” Second, does she convince you that these aspects of words should be taken into consideration to determine whether or not a word should be deemed obscene?
Why does Lawrence so clearly include derogatory ethnic terms like kike, coon, and wop (paragraph 11), whereas she fails to list the taboo sexual terms?
Even if you totally agree with Lawrence on this issue, come up with an argument that counterattacks one of her main points. Can you further predict how she might respond to this debate?
Do you agree with Lawrence on her point that people today are not shocked when they hear “obscene” language? If you agree, what factors in our society may serve to desensitize people to these words? If you disagree, offer specific examples as support for your position.
Get acquainted with the Oxford English Dictionary by researching the origin, use, changes, and meanings of three of your favorite words. (Brainstorm on this first!) What did you learn about these words by using this source?
ROBIN LAKOFF
Talking Like a Lady
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Robin Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She is coauthor of Face Value: The Politics of Beauty (1984) and When Talk Is Not Cheap: Or, How to Find the Right Therapist When You Don’t Know Where to Begin (1985). “Talking Like a Lady” is excerpted from her book Language and a Woman’s Place (1975).
Suggestion for Prereading or Journal Writing
According to some studies, when men and women talk with one another, the following things happen: Women ask 70 percent of the questions, and men interrupt 96 percent of the time. From your own experience, do you follow these patterns? Do most of the people you talk with follow these patterns? Explain, also, your own responses to people who ask questions or who interrupt while you are having conversations with them.
“Women’s language” shows up in all levels of the grammar of English. We find differences in the choice and frequency of lexical items; in the situations in which certain syntactic rules are performed; in intonational and other supersegmental patterns. As an example of lexical differences, imagine a man and a woman both looking at the same wall, painted a pinkish shade of purple. The woman may say:
(1) The wall is mauve,
with no one consequently forming any special impression of her as a result of the words alone; but if the man should say (1), one might well conclude he was imitating a woman sarcastically or was a homosexual or an interior decorator. Women, then, make far more precise discriminations in naming colors than do men; words like beige, ecru, aquamarine, lavender,...
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