Children Crossing Borders: Immigrant Parent and Teacher Perspectives on Preschool for Children of Immigrants

Chapter 4. Language

59 Chapter 4 language Of all the topics discussed in our interviews with parents and teachers, language was the one that produced the most comments. In focus group after focus group, immigrant parents told us that they were anxious for their children to learn English, but at the same time they worried about their children growing up losing fluency in their home language. We began the project expecting to hear strong support from immigrant parents for home-language preservation and endorsement of a bilingual approach in the preschool classroom. What we found instead was that most parents and some teachers, though worried that children would lose their home language and culture, did not see the school as having a major role to play in preventing such loss. To understand why the majority of our informants told us they wanted the preschool to concentrate on English as well as why others said they wanted a bilingual approach, we need to pay attention to not only the opportunities for language development in each of the communities where we conducted research but also the constraints on such development. This analysis reveals not a nationwide pattern but instead variation that reflects a combination of factors: the size and cultural heterogeneity of the community and the school where we conducted the interviews, as well as the percentage of new immigrants; the variety of home languages spoken by the children in a class; the community’s long experience or only recent experience of receiving immigrants from a particular language and cultural background; the presence or absence of bilingual teachers; and the local and state climate toward immigrants and language policy. In each setting we heard comments about language that may have been not so much expressions of belief about how young children’s language development should be supported in an ideal world as practical responses to imperfect situations and urgent concerns. 60 Children Crossing Borders The context should be kept in mind here: some of the schools where we conducted focus groups had teachers who were bilingual, while others had only English-speaking staff. In some of the schools—like Solano, where we made the video we used as a cue for the focus group discussions —teachers and children switched back and forth throughout the day between English and Spanish. But such mixing of Spanish and English was not the explicit practice of a systematic bilingual program but instead the intuitive practice of the teachers and children. None of the preschools where we conducted focus groups had a bilingual program, and none of the teachers had received systematic training in the strategies of bilingual education. PrAgmATism And ideologY Teachers in Nuevo Campo, a town on the border between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, explained to us that their community was firmly rooted in Mexican culture and Spanish was the language of everyday life. The Nuevo Campo teachers, who were all Hispanic and fully bilingual, told us that their approach to promoting children’s language development was to move as quickly as possible from instructing in Spanish to English, so that by the middle of the second of the two preschool years all instruction was in English. When we asked why they felt a need to move by the second year to an English-only approach, the teachers explained (in Spanish): Teacher 1: Because they are spoken to only in English when they go to the district (elementary school). So then they have to understand. Teacher 2: And we do it as a transition, little by little. Because they are going to enter kindergarten, how it would be for them when they get there if they have to face an unknown language? They won’t be able to use their language, their first language. Teacher 1: And academically too. If the teacher is teaching something to the child it’s going to be difficult, and I mean the child is not going to understand what the teacher is saying. These preschool teachers moved as quickly as possible from using Spanish to English in their classroom, not because they were philosophically opposed to bilingualism, or because they did not value homelanguage retention, but because of the realities of preparing children to enter primary school in Arizona, which is mandated to be English only (Wright 2005). These teachers worried that if children did not enter kindergarten fully fluent in English, they would quickly fall behind academi- language 61...