As Ramadiro worked his way through this period, he reached severaloverarching conclusions about the available materials. He concluded that muchof the available materials had been written in English, and back-translated toisiXhosa, and as such were not based on the linguistic logic of isiXhosa. They didnot take advantage of the home (oral) language resources of children in isiXhosaas the basis to build reading and writing skills. Second, taken together they didnot constitute a balanced reading programme guided by contemporary readingresearch (Pressley, 2006). There was no set of materials that combined a wholereading approach with systematic language skills (phonics, grammar etc.) inBefore... After...

Anne: So, you were playing this game with the tapes—Ben: With the tapes and stuff and then later we started elementary school and then once I started elementary school, it changed. Well my mother had a rule, she goes, "No English inside of the house.” Before, it’s “Speak English, speak English,” but once we started school, she goes, "I don't want you all speaking English here inside the house” to me and my brother. And we used to think that’s because she didn't understand, but it was because she wanted us to practice the Spanish.Ben: And when I would get home from school when I was going to kindergarten—my brother would get out an hour later—I would get home and my mother would give me these little comic magazines, Mexican comic magazines, and she'd have me read them. And then she would make me write letters to my grandmother. So that's how I was able to learn a little bit of, keep the Spanish and English. But English I did, I went through elementary, middle school, went to tenth grade in high school, then I dropped out of high school to go help my father. He started a small construction business, but then he got sick and he was hospitalized for three months.

Decisions to switch from a given behaviour to another (for example, from sitting to walking), or from one linguistic register to another, or even from one language to another may all be regulated by the same general neural mechanism,19 which may be neurofunctionally separate and independent of the linguistic system and of the translation system.5

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Spanish-speaking immigrants who struggled to reach the United States and struggle still at low-wage jobs to stay here so that their children can acquire and rise with an American education, very much including fluency in English.

“a substantial spillover effect”—higher math and reading scores—for children from English-only homes who were enrolled in schools with bilingual education programs.

abolish bilingual education in California

radically altering the education of hundreds of thousands of children. Now almost 17 years later, while the political tensions remain, a reversal is underway, powered largely by findings that bilingual instruction is what’s best for English language learners.