Problems Confronting Bilingual Education

Learning English language skills is a daunting task for a person with nor or little prior exposure to the language under the best of circumstances. The task becomes more challenging when one is a child attending and elementary school in the United States soon after arriving in this country. The learning and teaching problems are further exacerbated by the No Child Left Behind Act which mandates performance testing for schools and which relies heavily on the uses of standardized testing to assess school performance.

In an effort to better understand the needs of students participating in English As A Second Language (ESL) students and to (hopefully) develop insights as to how to improve the acquisition of English language skills among such students, a parent of a child recently arrived from Puerto Rico who is attending elementary school in a small city in the State of New York was interviewed. This memorandum summarizes what was learned through the conduct of this interview, together with information gleaned from journal articles reviewed in preparation for the conduct of the interview.

One salient point that emerged during the conduct of the interview was that parents whose own English language skills are limited feel that they cannot participate effectively in the ESL learning process in which their child is participating. In fact, however, research has found that such participation is b