He landed in this country when he was 4 years old without a word of English, and there he has recently graduated with honors from Loyola Academy.
An immigrant kid whose family rents an apartment in a city two-flat, he attended the North Shore school with full scholarship. All the aunts and uncles were so proud that they made their way from the old country or from various comers of this country to celebrate his graduation.
A debate is raging about whether immigrant children first should be taught English, then their other subjects; or whether they should be taught other subjects in their native tongue as they are more gradually introduced to English over two to three years.
California voters recently banished the gradual approach—bilingual education—in favor of immersion in the English language. The Chicago Public Schools in February put a three-year deadline on moving into all English classes in most cases. But that was never an issue for this graduate, and it never came up for discussion at his party. Relatives and friends laughed and reminisced in their native tongue, inside and outside, on sofas and lawn chairs. Before long, the instruments came out, old world music filled the air and the traditional dancing began.
Like many immigrant chidren, the graduate listens to his parents in the old language and responds to them in English. During a year after arriving here and enrolling in a Chicago Public School he was speaking fluent English with an American accent so strong that his parents would roll their eyes.
But fluency had not come easily; it required a year of total immersion in English, including a teacher who never could seem to learn how to pronounce his name correctly. "He’d come home crying," his mother said.
Now, you can’t hear a trace of his original language in his voice. The switch, at least for him, has been complete; a matter of personal preference early on, he says, but now to the point where he has trouble remembering how to speak his first language at ail.
But he still understands.
At the graduation party, his father asked for a beer in the native tongue, and the young man tossed him a can without missing a beat.
What the Chicago Public schools prefers to in language education is().
A．the gradual approach.
B．the immersion.
C．English teaching first.
D．the dabate over the issue.
