Tongue-Tied: The Lives of Multi-Lingual

Tongue-Tied: The Lives of Multi-Lingual Children in Public Education

Santa Ana, Otto. (2004). Tongue-tied: The lives of multilingual children in public schools. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Tongue-tied: The lives of multilingual children in public schools edited by Otto Santa Ana is an anthology that takes a unique approach to cataloguing the different injustices suffered by multilingual children in the American school system. As its title suggests, the implication is that the current method of incorporating children who speak multiple or different languages other than English into the school community leaves such students tongue-tied, or unable to voice their true selves. It does not teach English effectively, or enable these students to truly realize their academic and personal potential.

One of the more interesting features of this work is the fact that it does not present its argument in the form of a singular or even multiple essays, but instead uses personal essays as well as data-based research to substantiate its claims. This is to break down conventional means of chronicling academic performance, and to illustrate the emotional costs of forcing children to choose between English and their home language and culture. The diverse personal narratives chronicle the often painful experiences of bilingual or bi and multicultural children within a system that does not understand their needs. Both essays and academic sources compiled within the text show how the process of language acquisition is never culturally neutral. Rather, the system's implied need for children to acquire a new language is often rooted in colonial or post-colonial motivations, and there is an assumption that English is not simply necessary, but is superior to that of the child's home language. Thus the act of speaking English becomes a way for the state to forcibly sever the child's connection to his or her home.

The difficulty in gaining a foothold in English because of improper instruction or negative experiences early on in life may mean that the bilingual child grows up with a distinct disadvantage to his or her peers that are often impossible to surmount, with devastating long-term socioeconomic consequences. Although the first and fourth sections of the book are anecdotal and personal, the other sections of the book statistically examine how bilingual and bicultural children's life chances are determined too early on, and their lack of initial fluency results in their being tracked into lower-level classes for the duration of their public school career. It suggests that the idea of 'immersion' is a fallacy, and advocates methods that incorporate either dual curricula, or immersion only certain sections of the day in conjunction with classes specifically targeted to ESL needs, particularly in subjects that require higher-level vocabulary, like science and math.

The scope of the research essays are more narrow than one might like, although they do address important issues such as the need to create more effective approaches to bilingual education, and evidence of how the current approach is detrimental to students' progress. The impressionistic and personal nature of the first-person sections, and the substantial portion of the book devoted to critical theory, or an analysis of how children of a postcolonial world are forced to speak in the oppressor's language to be understood means that the book is often more thought-provoking than a data-driven analysis that might be persuasive to a legislator who is, for example, debating whether to support the continuation of No Child Left Behind or other standardized testing approaches to measures school progress.

The impact of "No Child Left Behind," the thesis of the book implies is that by requiring students to meet standards that they cannot initially comply with because of their multilingual background, and its 'one size fits all' approach to education, leaves students from nontraditional backgrounds at a distinct disadvantage. It cannot be denied that NCLB largely tests students on standardized measures that value verbal fluency above all else (interestingly, competency in a foreign language is not required in NCLB) bilingual students are shown in a poor light, and guidance towards specific prescriptive techniques to suit the individual student's cultural needs, level of fluency, and family situation is not provided by NCLB. NCLB encourages teaching students how to pass a test rather than fosters the type of skills they need to truly 'own' their learning at worst, or at best, by excludes students from school performance results, which may result in a lack of funding for ESL programs, as opposed to programs that really 'count' towards the magic numbers required to meet district standards.

The anthology questions the fundamental assumption that cultural assimilation is a necessary marker of progress in the American school system. The one potential advantage, albeit a small one, that NCLB might convey to students is the fact that failing school districts improperly serving bilingual children might be flagged early on, but the measures instated by schools to meet its requirements, such as teaching to a uniformly graded test, are unlikely to address the bicultural and bilingual student's identity crisis, which can be such a factor in language acquisition, the authors' works suggest time and time again. In fact, as the presence of essayist bell hooks suggests within the anthology, such a cultural and linguistic crisis of dialect can plague even non-ESL students who 'speak' a different dialect and who come from a vastly different culture than their teachers, such as African-American students.

One of the skills of the work is how it uses such disparately authored and styled essays to drive home the same unified thesis and theme, namely that a school the forces a loss of self upon the individual, and tries to render the child tongue-tied in his or her native language and/or culture, runs the risk of completely silencing the child altogether, and creating a hostile attitude towards learning that is counterproductive to both student and teacher. Not only is the 'melting pot' ideal quite ideologically problematic, in the way that it impinges upon a child's relationship with his or her private, family life through pressures exerted by the public school, but it also does not suit the cognitive needs of ESL students to transition into a new environment before they can cope with higher-level thinking in a new language.