|
The Best Educational Approach for Immigrant Children I believe that ESL instruction promoted simultaneously with bilingual education is the best general approach to educating immigrant children demonstrated by my children's two different ways of learning English. During the first year of living in the U.S., my six-year-old daughter went to a Japanese school on Saturdays and was in the first grade of ESL at her elementary school while my four-year-old son was in a preschool where all the teachers and children were English speakers. At the beginning of the year, my son started to speak English sooner than my daughter to survive in his total immersion setting. However, about half a year later, improvement gaps in their English acquisition emerged. Even though my son who had been learning English by ear was able to express what he wanted by simple sentences such as "I wanna go home" or "Gi-me a snack," he didn't know the meaning of each word and was not able to read even a single word. On the other hand, my daughter who had been taught phonics in her ESL class was now able to read and speak English with correct grammar and pronunciation. Fortunately, not having any Japanese classmates worked in her favor as she could never slip into her first language. In addition, my daughter had learned how it was important to follow teacher's directions and how essential reading and writing were from her experience at Japanese school. The next year, my daughter moved to a regular class and my son enrolled in ESL kindergarten at a public school and a kinder-class at Japanese school. In spite of the fact that my son's score on an English test for entrance into the public school had indicated that his English was adequate to get into a regular class, I had him enroll in ESL to learn the basics of English as I'd seen my daughter's improvement, which was such an eye-opener. She not only could keep up with the regular class but also had a tremendous ability to study other subjects by herself by reading and understanding textbooks in English. Even though my son followed in her footsteps in both ESL in public school and Japanese school on Saturdays, he had so many Japanese classmates that he didn't need to speak English to communicate. Thus his English skills went down. Having friends who speak the same language was probably necessary for him as he had been bullied in his preschool, but speaking in Japanese all the time obstructed his progress in English. From my children's experiences, I believe that my daughter followed the best path to learning English as an immigrant child. In her ESL class, she didn't hesitate to speak up even though she made mistakes as all the students were non-native speakers. She, therefore, avoided being bullied by American children for a lack of ability to comprehend English. Furthermore, studying other subjects in the public school that paralleled those taught in her native language in Japanese school helped her comprehend all the lectures in her regular class easily. Therefore, I sometimes feel sorry for my son, who was in a "sink or swim" preschool environment because not only did he spend a hard period in the immersion program but he has also struggled with a slow growth of his English language acquisition. March 21, 2005 "Writing Assignment prev |