CH7 WIlliams

       Chapter 7 provides a lot of background information on ESL students, bilingual education, dialects and Black Vernacular which I found insightful.  I tutor many ESL students at Cerritos College.  Technically, I am just a “Standard” English Writing tutor, but fortunately I am being cross-trained to become an ESL and Reading tutor as well.   I need the training anyway and this chapter has definitely helped understand the issues and research in bilingual education and ESL learners.  

  One part of the chapter that really interested me was the section on Home language.  “Parents who differentiate between lie and lay will typically discover that their children do not if the people in the neighborhood do not” (Williams 227).  This is true in my case.  I was born in Los Angeles and when I was about two years old, with my twin brother, I was raised by my aunt in the Philippines.  When we were six years old we returned to California.  We didn’t know how to speak or understand English during Kindergarten, but we learned how to speak and understand  it gradually.  By 1st grade we were almost fluent in English though we had the Filipino accent and we were sent to some ESL classes for a few months.   Years in elementary pass and suddenly we’ve become “Americanized” as my parents called it.  WE spoke and wrote in better English than they did although they’ve been U.S citizens for 15 years.  My parents speak tagalog at home and are now fluent in English but you would still be able to hear the accent.  

On other hand, though my brother and I can still understand tagalog, we can’t speak tagalog without having a ridiculous English accent.   “After about age 5, the community exerts more influence on the shape of the child’s language that the parents do” (Williams 227).  I guess this is part of the assimilation that Williams and other researchers were talking about in this chapter.  

Home Language is supposedly resistant to change, but I guess for younger children it isn’t.  English would become their home language after so many years of being immersed in it.  I find many ESL adult students being resistant sometimes.   It’s understandable.  I know learning a new language as an adult can be extremely frustrating.  I took two years of French in high school and I found myself resisting that language because it was a little too difficult for me...at that time.