Blog 8: Bilingual Education

The article I chose this week ties into my EDU 220 class on Stuctured English Immersion. Arizona does not participate in bilingual education, they sticlty instruct all student in English only. This article basically talks about struggles that ELL, English Language Learners, face when stuck in an English only school setting. It says that it can lower self-esteem and take a longer time to actually learn the language. What the article didn't talk about were the levels of fluency ELL students go through while learning the language. There are 5 levels: Pre-emergent, Emergent, speech emergence, intermediate fluency, and fluency. It can take 5-7 years for a non-English first language speaker to become fluent. The way schools know if a student is in need of SEI or ELL classes is by the home language survey. If parents put anything other than English as the students first language, there will be given the AZELLA test. This test shows where they are in fluency of English. A student must pass the AZELLA twice consecutively in order to be marked at fluent. However, because Arizona is an English only state, we do on tot foster the child's first language. Therefore, in some cases, the actual first language if the student is lost. Personally, I think if students were taught English in there first language, both languages could be truely fluent.

https://www.proenglish.org/projects/bilingual-education.html