Lack of English skills wastes time, money

Tuesday, October 27, 1998

Lack of English skills wastes time, money

LANGUAGE: Profusion of languages complicates schools, life in
America

If asked what language is spoken in Germany, one does not
struggle to figure out the answer. It is obviously German. Most, if
not all, of the people in that country speak its official language
and all government documents are in German.

You will find a similar situation in France, Japan, Ecuador,
Kenya and almost every country in the world – except the United
States. At first glance, one would think that is an odd statement.
Everyone in the United States speaks English – or at least tries.
All of our classes at UCLA (with the obvious exception of foreign
language classes) are in English. And most, if not all, of the
people we speak to on a daily basis speak English.

So what am I talking about?

We are a very lucky group of people. We live in a small
environment where the unofficial language of the country is spoken
almost exclusively.

Even our international students speak English – some of them
better than you and I do. There are many people here who can speak
different languages; everyone, however, speaks English. This makes
communication easy and predictable, just as it is in most other
countries. But this is not the case in all areas of the
country.

For example, in L.A. County, there are areas where, if you do
not speak Spanish, you cannot communicate with anyone. I have gone
to restaurants in Chinatown where I literally needed a translator
to order a meal. One would not have this problem in Mexico City or
Vienna, so why should it happen in Los Angeles? Does it not seem
ridiculous that I would have to learn a foreign language to order a
meal in the very city I was born and raised in?

I can already hear the liberals screaming at me to stop
complaining. "These are neighborhoods where there are large
Å’new immigrant’ populations, and obviously they are going to
have problems with the English language," the liberal dissenters
will proclaim.

"The immigrants are trying to learn English, but many of them
are older and it is difficult for them to learn so easily. The
younger kids are eager to learn the language of their new country
and given some time will succeed at this daunting task."

And to a large extent they are right, and those people should be
encouraged and provided the means to continue the assimilation
process. However, they are also wrong. Many of the older immigrants
have no intention of learning English and hide themselves in
neighborhoods where their native tongue is spoken. Not only do they
refuse to learn English, they refuse to allow their children and
grandchildren to speak it at home.

This makes it more difficult for the government-run English as a
Second Language (ESL) programs to teach the immigrant children how
to communicate with mainstream America. More importantly, it makes
it impossible for you and me to communicate with them.

Let us not forget that in the late 1980s the Latino community in
Florida came very close to making Spanish the official language of
the state. Think about that for a second. The federal government
has not spent the time to make English the official language of the
country, and yet the Florida Legislature came within a few votes of
making a foreign tongue the official language of Florida.

That would have meant, theoretically, that all state government
documents, road signs and public school textbooks would have been
in Spanish. Does that sound like a community that is trying to
learn English? I think not!

This problem goes beyond ordering food in Chinatown and the
faults of ESL; it is also about government money.

There are so many government documents produced in foreign
languages it boggles the mind. I remember when I was a kid, my
elementary school would always send important letters home to
parents. Many parents could not speak, much less read, English. To
deal with this problem, the Board of Education published the
various papers they sent home in eight different languages.

That is an expensive exercise.

Not too long ago, the Republican controlled House cited the
IRS’s 1040 tax form distribution as an example of the waste
incurred by producing bilingual government documents. In 1994, the
IRS spent taxpayer money to send out 500,000 tax forms in Spanish
to people they predicted would not be able to use the English
version. Only 117 of the Spanish forms were returned.

This foolishness is not confined to the IRS and the L.A. Unified
School District. When I went to take the written test to get my
driver’s license some five years ago, I quickly noticed that you
could take the test in any of 15 different languages. It is beyond
me why the government is spending all this money to cater to people
who are unwilling to learn English. If they cannot read the test,
which is simply an identification test of road signs, then how will
they be able to read the signs on the road?

I can hear the liberals screaming again. "The signs are designed
to be read by people who cannot read English, anyone can understand
them," they will whine. Then explain to me why they do not offer an
oral test for illiterate English speakers?

The government spends more time and money catering to
non-English speakers than to their own
"educationally-disadvantaged" people.

Bilingual education is the most embarrassing of these government
programs. We are actually teaching children in foreign languages,
encouraging them not to learn English.

A friend of mine argued that the programs allow kids to learn
math and science in their own language, while they are forced to
learn English in a country where nothing else is spoken. On the
surface this makes sense.

They keep up with their English speaking classmates by learning
math and science in their native tongue. Then they learn English,
with the help of ESL, in their neighborhoods and at home.

But wait a second, they do not speak English at home because no
one at home speaks English. So they are not learning the language
at school, and they are not learning it at home. No wonder I
usually go hungry when I visit Chinatown.

Every UCLA student knows the only way to learn a foreign
language is to be immersed in it. This means we should require that
school-age children study in classes where they are forced to
learn, speak and read English.

They may end up lagging academically, but as we all know Sen.
Phil Gramm failed the first, fifth and seventh grades, and look at
him now. It may take them longer to get through school, but they
will be better off in the end.

Making English the official language of our great country is not
only about saving money, it is also about encouraging immigrants to
assimilate, and to become Americans and not just immigrants.

Understanding English is the most basic requirement of truly
being an American. The government has an obligation not only to
make it difficult for immigrants to avoid learning English, but
also to require that they actually do learn the language. In the
end everyone will benefit and our version of the Tower of Babel
will crumble to the ground.

Daniel Inlender

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