Aria and Teaching Multilingual Children

Aria by Richard Rodriguez is a story about a young boy who must learn the English language which soooner takes over the "closeness" of his family. At school Richard says the nun's would constanly pressure him to answer and speak up. After a while the nun's became "fed up" with Rich-heard and confronted his parents "With great tact the visitors continued, Is it possible for you and your husband to encourage your children to practice their English when they are home?"(p.35) His parents were afraid to face authority and question the church. Richard claims this is the point where his family began to lose it's closeness.
"We remained a loving family, but one greatly changed. No longer so close;no longer bound tight by the pleasing and troubling knowledge of our public separateness." Richard then begins to explain that he realizes that he is an american citizen and his family began to learn neighbor names, get a telephone and share less words. He wasn't actually really sure what to call his parents anymore or have a conversation with them. This has to be hard for children in our school systems today who have parents that can't speak english so they have no choice but to speak their native language at home. At the end of this piece Richard Rodriguez argues that bilingual educaters that the people who speak another language are losing as much as they are gaining. We need the english language to survive in America but to compeletly deprive someone of it can change their family individuality.

Teaching Mulitllingual Children by Virginia Collier is a more optimistic piece when it comes to teaching bilingual children english. Collier gives seven guidelines for the teacher to use in the classroom. She explains what teachers are responsible for when teaching a classroom "Teachers are responsible for facilitating academic language development. Academic language does not come to kids automatically, just because they are in dominant English speaking locale."(p.225)
The guidelines can be very helpful when working with esl children. Guidelines 3 and 4 seem to be the most useful to me considering I work with ESl children as my service learning project. #3 "Don't teach a second language in any way that challenges or seeks to eliminate the first language." This would have been useful to Richard's teacher in the first peice. Some children have parents who can't speak english so at home they need that communication with their parents.
#4 "Teach the standard form of English and students' home language together with an appreciation of dialect differences to create an environment of language recognition in the classroom."(p.227) I see the point in this because when working with the students at teh elementary school they often don't know what some objects are called. For example one of the students had the work lake, and she didn't know what that was. I told her its a small body of water and I asked her how to say it in her language. She told me and I attemted to say it and seh began to laugh at me, and I told her see theres nothing to be ashamed of, learning a new language is very tricky. I can relate a lot to this piece because of my service learning project.
These guidelines produced by Collier will be useful so other students don't end up like richard rodriguez and can have a strong family life at home. If teachers in the classroom just put in a little more effort to help the children succeed in engilsh and still keep their native language.