Another good discussion on the Education and Class blog, about college students' resistance to abandoning the "working hard" theory of immigrant success, particularly as it pertains to learning English.
I'm not studying linguistics or ESL, but in the course of researching immigrant children's experiences in American schools I've come across a lot on the subject of kids learning English as a second language. I'm not going to try to be comprehensive here, but there are a few common myths that deserve debunking:
"Children learn second languages faster than adults."
Given the same exposure and instruction, older learners will generally learn faster than younger ones. People persist in believing children "just pick up" other languages for a several reasons:
– We expect less of children. The younger the child, the fewer words needed to appear fluent, meaning a 3-year-old who speaks like a native-speaking 3-year-old will appear more fluent than will a 15-year-old who speaks like a native-speaking 10-year-old, even though the second child has mastered much more of the language. We also confuse "knowing enough English to get around in an English-speaking country" with "knowing enough English to write an academic paper." The latter skill can take seven to ten years to develop (and, I'd submit, is something many native speakers never do 
). Since a third-grader isn't held to that standard anyway, it's easier to be impressed with his or her accomplishments, compared with the long hard slog a college-bound high school junior has in front of him/her.
– Extroversion is highly correlated with the ability to learn languages, regardless of age, and children are assumed to be much more extroverted than adults are. Overall, this is true. But there are ranges of introversion and extroversion within any given age group, and the adult assumption that kids learn faster because they "don't care if they make mistakes" does a disservice to shy kids, ones who care very much. In classroom situations, these introverted children may be pegged as obstinate or unintelligent if they are reluctant to speak the new language even after several months of exposure.
– Pre-pubescent children in full immersion settings will usually learn to speak the second language without an accent. For adults, accent reduction is an aspect of language learning that may never be mastered, even after they achieve fluency, so they envy children's facility with this. But accent is a very small part of "knowing" a language. It is common for teachers to mistake a child's accent-free English for fluency. Like their shy counterparts, these children may be believed to be obstinate or unintelligent if the complexity of their ideas (expressed verbally) doesn't match their facility with idiom and accent.
(Lest anyone dismiss these things as obvious, let me say I was told repeatedly as a teenager that my parents had "missed the window" by not speaking German with me at home, so that by age 14 or 15, when I started studying German in earnest in an immersion setting, teachers and relatives alike treated me as though I were no better than a dabbler and that teaching anyone as old as me was a waste of their efforts. You definitely see this attitude in American high school teachers as well, when faced with immigrant teenagers: by 13 they're already believed to be "too old" to ever learn English well, so why waste resources on them? Go pick lettuce instead. Meanwhile their younger siblings are considered addled if they're not speaking in complete sentences within five minutes of arriving in an American classroom. After all, don't kids learn languages immediately, as if by magic, just by breathing English-speaking air?)
"My grandfather got off the boat at Ellis Island and was speaking English fluently within a month. Why can't everyone do that?"
Your grandfather probably did no such thing. As the blog post linked above says, "It sometimes seems as if some of these students project their own relative comfort back several generations, even while they also claim a family legacy of "working hard to make it"." A look at the historical data prior to the 1920s (when national origin quotas were introduced) tells us several things.
One, your grandfather probably got off the boat and moved immediately to an immigrant enclave, where he socialized primarily with other immigrants. If he was financially successful it was likely because he found a niche in that community.
Two, if and when he did learn English, it was limited at first to the phrases and simple sentence constructions required for his work. (He would not have aced the SAT a month of that boat.)
Three, it's unlikely your grandfather went to college. That usually took a few generations.
Four, prior to WWI and the Depression, when nativist sentiment dramatically increased, the U.S. had a great deal of linguistic diversity. It was very common for German immigrants to send their children to German schools, for example. There were hundreds of foreign-language newspapers in New York City alone. It was possible to achieve a reasonably fulfilling working-class lifestyle without ever learning English, just because support for one's home language was so strong. (There are parallels with that today in some regions and communities, but they are proportionately fewer than in earlier eras.)
Five, the reason he is your grandfather is because he was a member of the successful minority, one who was able to stay, marry, and survive to have children in America. The "sink-or-swim" climate of the 1910s and 1920s meant a whole lot of people sank: a third to one-half went back to their country of origin; of those who stayed, many died of illnesses that could have been treated if they had more financial, social, and linguistic resources. As rough as your grandfather had it, when you speak of him you are actually speaking of a privileged minority, given the brutal class and ethnic divisions of the time. Which is fine — good for your grandpa and everything — but his experience doesn't provide much of a road map if we're talking about creating a model in which all immigrants will learn English, since that emphatically did not happen in the early part of the 20th century.
Six, your grandfather probably benefited from white privilege, which compensated for some of his language issues. With the caveat that modern paradigms of race should not be applied retroactively (Jews, Greeks, Italians, etc. were seen as, referred to, and treated as separate "races" back then), and the acknowledgment that therefore modern immigration issues do not constitute an entirely new framework in that regard (despite the oft-repeated claim that racial pluralism is "new"), a Jewish/Greek/Italian man in the Jim Crow era was going to have some competitive but wholly unearned advantages over other workers that a modern Somalian refugee will not.
Seven, your grandfather probably had more trouble assimilating than you think he did. Italians in the 1930s, for example, were considered truants, drop-outs, and troublemakers, and folks often wondered if there was something inherent to the Italian character that made them less hard-working and less intelligent than proper English stock. Then, like now, ethnic discrimination outside the school system was less likely to be entertained as a factor.
"Bilingual education is the answer."
The flip-side of the above argument — that everyone should learn English but without any support — is that schools should become fully bilingual, teaching kids one week or half the day in one language, and the rest of the time in English. Data shows this is the best way for immigrant children to learn, because it allows them to develop content knowledge appropriate to their grade level in their language of origin, and that it's useful for monolingual (English-speaking) children as well.
The trouble is that it's a Spanish-centric argument. In some regions you might have a critical mass of other students, say Chinese, to merit their own bilingual school, but at the end of the day you are always going to have kids who speak Amharic, Swahili, and any number of other languages who will not be served by the fully bilingual option. And even within Spanish schools you have dialect diversity and students who are considered minorities-within-a-minority. (One of the saddest case studies I read this year was of a Salvadoran girl who had been ostracized by her Mexican classmates in her ESL class, a division her teacher was oblivious to. Since she couldn't speak English, either, she had literally no friends in school.)
None of this is an argument against bilingual education where it's practical; only that as a mass solution it's unworkable. Students will still need more traditional ESL support.
"Schools should be preparing kids for The Real WorldTM, not engaging in these PC debates about multiculturalism."
The irony here is that The Real WorldTM has already embraced multiculturalism, sheerly because it's profitable. The book Pledging Allegiance: Learning Nationalism at the El Paso-Juarez Border has a good discussion of border cultures and how business has embraced bilingualism faster than the education system has. McDonald's, for example, "makes sure even monolingual English-speaking employees know how to ask if customers want their papas to be chicas o grandes." I know plenty of isolationists who will treat that as cause for alarm — my kid can't even get a job at McDonald's without learning Spanish! — but they are often the same people arguing for a pro-business, up-from-your-bootstraps vision of success. And there they face a contradiction, because you don't get to have it both ways: you don't get to claim capitalism=God AND demand that immigrants learn English (thereby becoming bilingual) WHILE still believing your own monolingual children should have some natural advantage in a workplace that favors linguistic pluralism.
Luckily, that view is rare. I don't know many parents who are opposed to their children learning languages, although living in the U.S. we have less experience with how that's accomplished. What I do see, though, is a lot of educators forced to abandon ESL and foreign language programs to accommodate No Child Left Behind, as well as a sense of nervousness about prioritizing this issue because they believe there will be strenuous parental and political opposition. There's also a lack of teachers of languages other than Spanish, and of course never enough funding to overhaul the system, ground up.
