The Latino Gap: Not Quite Trilingual
LOS ANGELES - Like so many students that I’d taught in Los Angeles, Andrea could speak three languages. “I speak Spanish, English, and Kanjobal,” she told me.
At the time she said this in early 2008, we both thought it was true. And in some ways, it was true. She spoke Spanish with her brother and sisters at home. She spoke Spanish and Kanjobal - which is a Mayan language - with her parents, both of whom are from Guatemala. And she spoke English with me, the fifth first-grade teacher she had that year.
Then one day, it became clear that this was only sort of true - that in fact, Andrea could only sort of speak Spanish and only sort of speak English and really knew just a couple of words in Kanjobal. That day was the day we held parent-teacher conferences, which in Los Angeles public schools , are really student-parent-teacher conferences, student-led and student-directed with the idea being this helps students take more ownership over their school work.
So we prepared the classroom. The kids rehearsed what to say. And then, when their parents came into the room, the kids could hardly say anything to them. They mostly went to all the designated points on the classroom tour and tried a few times to explain where they were or what they did there before getting very quiet and just giving up. Next door, another first-grade teacher, Nikki Reich, saw more or less the same thing.
“They have to tell their parent[s] about their work,” Reich said. “And so they’re trying to describe it to them in like a Spanglish. It would be, for example: ‘Mama, mira this paper.’” She goes on: “And the mom doesn’t speak any English. And the son, he doesn’t know Spanish very well. So it makes me wonder: How are they talking at home?”
This was a question teachers said came up a lot during conferences, especially when parents and kids had such a hard time talking to each other that the interpreter - who’d actually been hired for the teacher - spent most of her time walking around the classroom, translating between kids and their parents.
Guatemala Literacy Rate - News
She spoke Spanish and Kanjobal - which is a Mayan language - with her parents, both of whom are from Guatemala. And she spoke English with me, the fifth first-grade teacher she had that year. Then one day, it became clear that this was only sort of
Yet, in a nation that boasts of a literacy rate of nearly 90 per cent, educated and enlightened by a sweeping communications revolution, those who promote utopian ideals do not realise they are not believed but laughed at. Thus, it is the credibility