Forked Tongue: The Politics of Bilingual Education

By Rosalie Porter

Book Overview

Today children who are not fluent in English--legal and illegal immigrants, refugees, and native born--are the fastest growing portion of our population, accounting for more than half the children in classrooms in many city schools. Bilingual education programs established by federal and state laws have required that such students be taught basic subjects in their native languages rather than in English. Judged by most applicable measures--such as achievement scores and dropout rates--these programs have not been successful.

This edition includes new material on recent efforts to reform bilingual education, on the growing trend across the country toward English language programs, on the latest national research studies, and on the movement to make English the official language of the United States. Forked Tongue is a devastating inside account of how the twenty-eight-year experiment in bilingual education has failed our language-minority children--and why. Rosalie Porter draws on local, state, and international experience to provide us with the first authoritative account of which policies, programs, and practices actually succeed with the children they are intended to serve. Forked Tongue will be of interest to educators, sociologists, and scholars interested in second language acquisition.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560008814
• ISBN13: 9781560008811
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 378 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Forked Tongue: THe Politics of Bilingual Education

I appreciated that Ms. Porter shared her efforts in working on this topic. Although I am not an educator, I researched the topic of bilingual education for a paper in my graduate studies in order to better understand this volitile issue that affects our country. Ms. Porter's insights were valuable to me for two reasons: she provide me with great research information and she spoke from the experience of being an immigrant child herself. Not only did her book give me valuable insights about the issue of bilingual education, but gave me pause to consider whether or not planning cirriculum at the national level is more effective than allowing local admistrators to plan based on their special needs.