Tongue-Tied: Multilingual Children in Public Education Review

Overview of the Anthology

Tongue-Tied: The Lives of Multilingual Children in Public Schools, edited by Otto Santa Ana (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), is an anthology that takes a unique approach to cataloguing the injustices suffered by multilingual children in the American school system. As its title suggests, the anthology argues that current methods of incorporating children who speak languages other than English into the school community leave such students tongue-tied — unable to voice their true selves. The system neither teaches English effectively nor enables these students to realize their full academic and personal potential.

One of the more interesting features of this work is that it does not present its argument through conventional essays alone. Instead, it combines bilingual education scholarship with personal narratives to substantiate its claims. This approach is designed 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.

Personal Narratives and Academic Research

The diverse personal narratives in the anthology chronicle the often painful experiences of bilingual and multicultural children within a system that does not understand their needs. Both the personal essays and the academic sources compiled in the text demonstrate how the process of language acquisition is never culturally neutral. Rather, the system's implicit demand that children acquire English is often rooted in colonial or postcolonial motivations, with an underlying assumption that English is not simply necessary but superior to the child's home language. The act of speaking English thus becomes a mechanism through which the state forcibly severs the child's connection to home and heritage.

The scope of the research essays is narrower than one might prefer, though they do address important issues: the need for more effective approaches to bilingual education, and evidence that the current approach is detrimental to students' progress. The impressionistic, first-person sections and the substantial portion of the book devoted to postcolonial critical theory — analyzing how children of a postcolonial world are compelled to speak in the oppressor's language to be understood — make the book more thought-provoking than data-driven. This may limit its persuasive power with legislators, for example, who are debating whether to support the continuation of No Child Left Behind or other standardized testing approaches to measuring school progress.

Bilingual Education and Academic Tracking

The difficulty in gaining a foothold in English because of improper instruction or negative early experiences may mean that the bilingual child grows up with a distinct and often insurmountable disadvantage relative to peers, with devastating long-term socioeconomic consequences. Although the first and fourth sections of the book are anecdotal and personal, the other sections statistically examine how bilingual and bicultural children's life chances are determined too early, and how a lack of initial fluency results in students being tracked into lower-level classes for the duration of their public school careers.

The anthology suggests that the idea of full "immersion" is a fallacy, and it advocates methods that incorporate either dual curricula or immersion for only certain parts of the school day, in conjunction with classes specifically targeted to ESL needs — particularly in subjects requiring higher-level vocabulary, such as science and mathematics.

Conclusion: Toward a Pluralistic Approach

Of course, almost everyone has heard the argument that "my grandparents came from Ellis Island and learned English without any special education." But simply because people have done so does not mean that this is the best or most effective approach to ESL education. Moreover, today's education at every grade level is far more specialized and technical. Effectively transitioning students with an imperfect grasp of English into more demanding subjects often requires a gentler and more graduated pedagogical technique if students are to maximize their full potential.

Finally, allowing for greater diversity of approaches on a district-to-district basis may be advisable. Districts with ESL students from many linguistic backgrounds — as opposed to those with predominantly Spanish or Chinese speakers — may justifiably wish to use strategies better suited to the composition of their population. Rhetoric of the "melting pot" aside, America is a nation founded upon individualism, not assimilation. Creating an individualized and pluralistic approach to bilingual education is not only more effective — it may also be more authentically American.