What's best: Bilingual ed or 'immersion'

By Mike Quinn

Here in New York, as has happened in California already, the corporate media is boo-hooing funding for bilingual education. The new, politically correct, free-market-type policy and buzzword is called "immersion."

This means that immigrant children should be immersed in all-English classes as soon as they enter school here. This way, the theory goes, they'll learn English faster and better and thus be more successful in school and ultimately, it is presumed, more successful in life. And coincidentally, the city won't have to cough up any money for bilingual education anymore.

The main reason I'm against immersion is that it is a very scary word. You see, anytime I've been immersed in anything it has been an unpleasant experience.

For example, once when I was in high school, I drank too much alcohol and regurgitated all the food that was in my stomach. In fact, I was so drunk that I fell and was immersed in it.

There was another time I was walking with a friend through New York's Central Park along a path where many horse and buggy carriages tread. At one point, I tripped and was immersed in horse dung. So you see, the word "immersion" is associated with trauma, embarrassment and shame in my own mind.

Perhaps if they called it "embracing" or "hugging" I would be for it. In other words, if they said, "Henceforth, immigrant children will be embraced by English until they speak it well," it would be O.K. with me. Or how about, "We will now hug children with English until they love it."

In a recent New York Times article on the immersion method, the journalist gave an example of an immigrant child who was immersed in all-English classes in a catholic school and, within several years, knew more English words than words in her native Spanish language. This was used, apparently, as an example of success.

In an age of globalization, the Internet, worldwide wireless communication, etc., will it be advantageous for her if she knows English better than Spanish? Some of the most successful television stations and city newspapers and magazines here are in Spanish, not to mention a rather large portion of the earth referred to as Latin America. Most of the hottest singers and musical groups in the U.S. and in the world now are Spanish speaking and Spanish singing.

The world today holds three times as many native speakers of Chinese as native speakers of English. The numerical gap is impressive: about 1,113 million people speak Chinese as their mother tongue, whereas only 372 million speak English. The proportion of native English-speakers in the world population is expected to shrink this century from more than 8 percent to less than 5 percent.

In addition, non English speakers are the fastest growing group of new Internet users. Internet traffic in languages other than English is expected to outstrip English-language traffic within the next few years. That's because there are about 372 million people in the world whose native language is English and about 5,700 million people whose native language is something else.

I'm not against children learning English. I think it's a good thing in the context of bilingual education that provides instruction in learning the English language while simultaneously covering the curriculum in their native language.

But if New York City and other U.S. cities and states go the same way as California and cut funding for bilingual education and replace it with the immersion method, then I would fight to have kids immersed in Chinese. Because when most people of the world hear English, they disparagingly remark, "It all sounds Greek to me."

Mike Quinn is a New York City schoolteacher.