Tongue-Tied: The Lives of Multi-Lingual Term Paper

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It cannot be denied that NCLB largely tests students on standardized measures that value verbal fluency above all else (interestingly, competency in a foreign language is not required in NCLB) bilingual students are shown in a poor light, and guidance towards specific prescriptive techniques to suit the individual student's cultural needs, level of fluency, and family situation is not provided by NCLB. NCLB encourages teaching students how to pass a test rather than fosters the type of skills they need to truly 'own' their learning at worst, or at best, by excludes students from school performance results, which may result in a lack of funding for ESL programs, as opposed to programs that really 'count' towards the magic numbers required to meet district standards.

The anthology questions the fundamental assumption that cultural assimilation is a necessary marker of progress in the American school system. The one potential advantage, albeit a small one, that NCLB might convey to students is the fact that failing school districts improperly serving bilingual children might be flagged early on, but the measures instated by schools to meet its requirements, such as teaching to a uniformly graded test, are unlikely to address the bicultural and bilingual student's identity crisis, which can be such a factor in language acquisition, the authors' works suggest time and time again. In fact, as the presence of essayist bell hooks suggests within the anthology, such a cultural and linguistic crisis of dialect can plague even non-ESL students who 'speak' a different dialect and who come from a vastly different culture than their teachers, such as African-American students.

One of the skills of the work is how it uses such disparately authored and styled essays to drive home the same unified thesis and theme, namely that a school the forces a loss of self upon the individual, and tries to render the child tongue-tied in his or her native language and/or culture, runs the risk of completely silencing the child altogether, and creating a hostile attitude towards learning that is counterproductive to both student and teacher.

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Not only is the 'melting pot' ideal quite ideologically problematic, in the way that it impinges upon a child's relationship with his or her private, family life through pressures exerted by the public school, but it also does not suit the cognitive needs of ESL students to transition into a new environment before they can cope with higher-level thinking in a new language.

Of course, almost everyone has heard the argument that 'my grandparents came from Ellis Island, and learned English without any special education.' But simply because people have done so does not mean that this is the best or most effective approach to ESL education. Moreover, today's education on every grade level is far more specialized and technical, and effectively transitioning into more difficult subjects for students with an imperfect grasp of English often requires a gentler and more graduated pedagogical technique, for students to maximize their full potential. Finally, allowing for more diversity of approaches on a district-to-district basis may be advisable, given that districts with ESL students from many backgrounds, as opposed to those with predominantly Spanish or Chinese speakers, may justifiably wish to use strategies better suited to the composition of their population. Rhetoric of the 'melting pot' aside, America is a nation founded upon individualism, not assimilation, and creating an individualized and pluralistic approach is both more effective, and perhaps more 'truly' American for our school system......

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