Bilingualism in the US

Bilingualism has had a bad rap lately. Prop 227, the Unz Initiative, successfully passed removing bilingual education from California schools replacing it with English immersion. For some reason, Americans feel that only one language is necessary and that language is English only. Although the general consensus is to remove any form of bilingualism in this country, research has shown that being bilingual is not bad but is actually a good trait to have. Bilingualism is defined …

…exclusive use of English throughout elementary school, early-exit bilingual, in which Spanish was used for about one-third of the time in kindergarten and first grade then rapidly switch to English, and late-exit bilingual, that taught kindergarten primarily in Spanish then steadily increasing the amount of English thereafter up to about sixty percent in the 5th and 6th grades. They found that late-exit bilingual children performed the best even surpassing the monolingual children’s learning rate.