La Raza Hispana The importance of bilingualism in the hispanic community
As Hispanic students, your fluency in both Spanish and English is vital in order to satisfy your both cultures. In this country, knowing English is crucial for your success in any situation and for a better future. Whether you notice it or not, you're part of two cultures that make up who you are, you would hate to lose your Hispanic side due to a different language and country. In order to succeed in this country of opportunity, you must be able to master English literacies. Being bilingual allows you to connect with your community all while helping you perform efficiently in school, ultimately making you gain literacies in both languages.
To begin with, the education you get highly influences your literacy skills in not only English but Spanish as well. The ASHA website provides the article, “Acquiring English as a Second Language” where it goes deeply into detail on some normal phenomenon that may occur to you during the process of learning English. The first things the ASHA article talks about is that it's normal for an ELL student to be misplaced academically due to the fact that they don’t quite understand English, this ultimately restrains the child of developing their full potential. It is also common for these ELL’s to use "Spanglish", however, this isn’t a negative sign but "a normal phenomenon-a sign of a language difference, not a language disorder”. When learning a new language, it is also normal to go through a silent period, according to the article, the younger the child the longer this silent period, during this time, the child is actually trying to “focus on understanding the new language”. Finally, it is normal for a child to experience language loss, what this means is that because they are only being taught in English, they begin to lose touch with their first language. This is what the article calls,
"Subtractive BILINGUALISM"
and it can be
"very detrimental to CHILDREN's learning and to their family lives".
In the same way as you, I come from a Hispanic community where my first language was pure Spanish, because of this I attended bilingual classes. In these bilingual classes, me and my classmates learned in our native language all day and the only times we were exposed to English was during “specials”, a time where children from all classrooms mixed to form a group and participated on one of the following: art, library, computers, health and fitness or music. In this one hour period, we were taught by an English speaking teacher and some of the children there were English speakers as well, this gave me a chance to practice my English. This setup continued until I reached the fourth grade, where we had a Spanish teacher for half the day and an English speaking teacher for the other half. I did surprisingly well with this transition. That school year and the next were the years I progressed the most on my English literacies, and before I knew it, I was taking advanced middle school classes. Coming from a Hispanic community gave me the opportunity to grow my literacies in Spanish before acquiring them in English, allowing me to grow strong literacy skills in both languages.
Like me, my little sister is enrolled in bilingual courses. She reads and does homework in Spanish with the exception of math, where all her instructions are given in English.
In your Hispanic community, being bilingual goes a long way. With this second language, we as a community can expand our knowledge's and goods to other people. Living in a time where diversity is everywhere, stores and other public places offer some way of English service, this goes to show that we are connecting more and more with our English speaking neighbors.
It is also important to mention the benefits that bilingualism has to offer, the article "The Benefits of being Bilingual" posted by the ECLKC website talks about how being bilingual benefits you emotionally, cognitively, globally and education wise. They mention that bilingual people tend to have more active and flexible brains. Emotionally, you are more attached to your family, community and culture, making you happier. Not only that but bilingual children are also able to create friends in both their native language and also their new language, this helps them learn how to make stronger relationships. One of the biggest benefits that bilingualism has to offer is at a global scale, the article mentions that two-thirds of our population is bilingual and that people who can speak two languages have better job opportunities and make about 7,000 dollars more than their monolingual friends.
Living in a society filled with a variety of people, cultures and languages, you cannot deprive yourself from learning a second language nor from forgetting your native one. Being bilingual is freeing yourself from your cage and flying to new places. Be bilingual, be complete.