Word: englishes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...1960s a spectacular popularization of ethnic pride took place, and cultural heterogeneity emerged as the new ideal. Bilingual-education legislation, passed by Congress in 1974, declared that non-English-speaking children should be given the chance to study in their own language in order to smooth the transition into U.S. life. Going a step further, the act also set up a number of bicultural programs, so that children could reinforce, rather than shed, their primary cultural heritage. Going even further than that, neighboring Canada has been officially bilingual since 1969 ?although the separatist provincial government in Quebec has decreed...
Scarcely a decade ago, such a welter of tongues would have been unspeakable in an American public school. For more than a century, the great melting-pot theory decreed that foreign-speaking children be taught solely in English to speed their assimilation into the mainstream. The children of 50 million immigrants were forced to master English that way. Some 22 states even outlawed teaching in foreign languages...
...spectrum of languages sweeps from Aleut in Alaska to Yiddish in New York. Meanwhile, at least ten states have passed legislation mandating bilingual instruction in those school districts with a minimum number of children?usually ten to 20?who speak a foreign language and are seriously deficient in English...
...official purpose of the federal bilingual programs is to help foreign-speaking children use their native tongue to learn English rapidly, then switch to a regular school program. Yet the degree of emphasis on English differs markedly from program to program...
...called transitional programs shoot their students into regular English-speaking classrooms as quickly as possible. Under a second technique, called the maintenance method, rapid mastery of English is still the goal. But students continue studying their own culture and language. A third approach, being tried in areas with large Hispanic enclaves, such as New York, Florida and Southern California, is bilingual and bicultural: the programs encourage native-born Americans to achieve fluency in a foreign language even as their counterparts are learning English. In Miami's Coral Way Elementary School, which inaugurated the bicultural method to cope with the huge...