A Gift or Barrier?
——Immigrants’ language heritage
It is well known that America is a nation of immigrants and descendant’s of immigrants. Millions of immigrants from different ethnic groups, cultures, religions move to this country to pursue their American dreams. As an important component of identity, English is regarded as the only language of America. Therefore, Immigrants who speak a language other than English are under the pressure to assimilate linguistically. Nowadays, more and more native languages spoken in American territory, bilingualism is more common today than in the past. According to this tendency, many American commentators convey their anxieties about the fading of America identity, they said that English is “no longer the linguistic glue holding America together”. On the other hand, multiculturalists hope new immigrants’ native languages will persist. They believe bilingualism will enrich the American culture background. Based on this controversy, that mother tongue is a gift or barrier to the immigrants, becomes a really meaningful question. As for me, I think, as a heritage gift to the second-generation immigrants, mother tongue could bring them better future on account of today’s global economy system, and these bilingual citizens are also beneficial to the state, as they can help promote international understanding.
How Can I Avoid Literal/Verbal Translation from My Native Language When Writing an English Essay
As a foreign English learner, , I constantly make grammatical and structural errors when writing in English even though I started learning English at a very early age and have a relatively better speaking and listening ability among my peers. In fact, many Asians, Mandarin users like me in particular, encounter such problem a lot when writing in the English language. As a consequence, I want to ...
To begin with, what the bilingualism opponents assert that native language will pillage the territory of English is not a truth. Statistics shows most children who grow up in immigrant households speak an immigrant language at home, but almost all are proficient in English. For example, “among second-generation Hispanics, 92 percent speak English well or very well, even though 85 percent speak at least some Spanish at home; among Asian groups, 96 percent are proficient in English and 61 percent speak an Asian mother tongue.”(Chung and Zhang: “Exploratory Model on Advising Bilingual Parenting among Chinese Immigrants”, 2005) As we know, the first-generation immigrants, typically learned just enough English to get by. Their children were born in USA and raised in homes where parents and older adults spoke the mother tongue to them. However, they preferred to speak English, not only communicating with siblings and friends, but even when responding to parents. And the statistics also shows that the first-generation immigrant had a high lever desire for their children to learn English well, because they deeply recognize that English is the language of America and the basic tool for survival and success in the society. They don’t want their children suffer the pain of lacking of English proficiency as they had to. From these facts, we can hardly say that English is endangered.
Furthermore, there is much potential advantage for the second-generation immigrants to take with their heritage language. First, it is said that language is the DNA of culture, thus persisting mother tongue helps immigrants’ children to maintain their culture heritage, and also enhances their self-esteem. In other words, the second-generation immigrants who barely speak mother language may have problems of communicating with their parents, and may feel isolated from mother culture. A lot of famous novels describe this kind of culture conflict and struggle. Like ( written by Amy Tan), those American- born daughters can’t understand their Chinese-born mothers because of
The Essay on Foreign Language and English
Nowadays, almost six thousands languages are spoken in different countries. And unfortunately, half of them are in danger of defunctness. Certainly, the disappearance of a language can be attributed to the system of communication. However, one can say that it is a loss of culture and expression of human experience. According to Baldwin (2006) “foreign language is a language not spoken by the ...
the barrier of understanding the cultural background where their mothers came from. On the contrary, two generations communicating with same language will help to eliminate the difference in a great part. Second, bilingualism may enhance children’s cognitive skills. Scientific studies have shown that it is easier to learn a new language at a young age, bilingualism or bilateral is not difficult for a child if trained on purpose. Children who speak more than one language tend to learn new things faster. Last but not least, second-generation immigrants who are bilingualism are also at an advantage in the current globalized job market. Today we are surely in a global economic system, people who handle multiple languages well may be put in an important position, lots of companies has high interests in hiring such bilingual employee. That is why Asian language classes, such as Mandarin, Korean and Japanese, have seen increased over the past ten years.
The last viewpoint for this issue is that bilingualism is also benefit the United States. Why said that? As everyone knows, America is, after all, a nation of immigrants, multiple-culture is just her fascination. Bilingualism promotes racial and ethnic tolerance. It is very important for children, and also for adults, to learn about other cultures so that they can develop respect for all people in general.
Paula Patrick, the Fairfax system’s foreign language coordinator, said “Americans have for too long had a mind-set that everyone else in the world could learn English.” But now, “Her district is receiving appeals from businesses that need global-ready travelers and from a health care industry that needs translators.” (Joseph Berger, Building a Nation of Polyglots, Starting With the Very Young, New York Time, November 14, 2007)
From what have been discussed above, we may safely draw the conclusion that immigrants mother tongue may persist, especially for the second-generation immigrant, native language is a precious gift from their original culture, and it will help them lead better life in both adopted culture and mother culture.
The Term Paper on Issue of Immigrant child in Canada
During the recent years, there has been extraordinary raise in the number of immigrants in Canada. Asians cover the largest group of the recent arrivals to Canada. During 1986 and 1991, there were 819,000 immigrants in Canada of whom 19 percent of them were children under the age of 12 years . (New Canadian children). At present, Asians are the fastest growing population in Canada. Asian ...
