Bilingualism and Me

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2657529.pdf

Until I got to college, I had never encountered bilingualism as a hot-button issue. In fact, the word bilingualism had not entered my vocabulary until recently. I grew up and went to school in San Francisco, the birthplace of Lau v. Nichols, where the teachers and curriculum are probably more open-minded compared to those of school districts in more conservative parts of the country. Also, many, perhaps a majority, of the students in the SFUSD are bilingual to some extant, usually with either Chinese or Spanish as their first language. An English Only stance would never see the light of day in my city. I think I first heard the term bilingualism in the Psychology 2 course I took at Cal, when I learned that bilingual students performed better academically than monolingual students. Since then, I had only heard good things about bilingual education, with one exception. In recent years, some politicians wanted to make English the official language of America, back when our failing economy was not the number one issue and illegal immigration and a border wall were instead on top of everyone's minds. But these lawmakers were just xenophobic fear mongers, the same people who changed French fries to Freedom fries when France declined to join our "Coalition of the Willing." I had yet to hear a solid argument against bilingualism. But at the same time, I just accepted without question that bilingualism enhances academic achievement, a widely accepted sentiment. I actually favored bilingualism more for the culture sharing it fostered. Then I read an interesting article, "Bilingualism and the Academic Achievement of First and Second Generation Asian Americans: Accommodation with or without Assimilation?" (The link is above), which posits that bilingualism's positive effect is mediated by the dialogue between the student and his or her parents made possible by bilingual education. Take a look.