English Immersion Programs: Who is Targeted?

English Immersion Programs: Who is Targeted?

The topic of immigrant students entering not only our country but our public school systems, is slowly becoming a bigger and bigger controversy within the United States. Students are coming in from all over the world and entering our English-speaking school system without a word of English in their vocabulary. When they are thrown into the melting pot of today’s pubic schools, their presence affects so many more people than one would think. My belief that English immersion should replace bilingual programs can be correlated with three main groups all taking opposing stances on my argument. The three primarily affected groups are the immigrant students themselves, today’s workforce, and the bilingual education teachers. These three groups, all things considered, all take different approaches to the abolishment of bilingualism. Students would most likely agree with English immersion so that they can adapt better and sooner, while teachers would most likely disagree because their entire curriculum and teaching style would be subject to drastic changes. While these two groups are extreme opposites, today’s workforce serves to go either way. The three groups: students, the workforce and bilingual education teachers, serve as representatives for the many sides of the controversial changing of bilingual education in today’s high schools.

Students are without a doubt, the most affected group within the bilingual education controversy. They are the children who are entering a new environment at one of the most crucial time in their lives. They need to learn the academics to help them succeed in the future, but how can they learn anything if they don’t even speak English?

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...English immersion programs.

There are perhaps thousands of groups that are and will be affected by bilingual education now and in the future. However, three main groups are affected more directly than most. Their correlation with the bilingual education controversy makes their standpoint on English immersion very biased. Students, today’s workforce, and bilingual teachers take very different sides when the education debate is considered. These three groups represent different sides of the growing controversy over the replacement of bilingual education with English immersion education in the United States.

Works Cited:

Valdés, Guadalupe. Learning and Not Learning English. New York:

Teachers College Press, 2001.

Valdez, Elsa O. “Winning the Battle, Losing the War: Bilingual Teachers

and Post-Proposition 227.” The Urban Review 33 (2001): 237-53.