FIQWS

November 19.2019

Juana Martinez, a Mexican immigrant fills out a survey, called the Home Language Survey, the survey asked four simple questions about the language spoken at home. Juana didn’t really imagine that the answer to these questions would jeopardize her child in any way. Normally language surveys that ask questions about the child and are confidential and in many cases non jeapordizable, in any case we wouldn’t believe that the school could be discriminating against the child in any way. Omed, Juana’s child was born in Mexico but was brought to the united states when he was a baby. He grew up knowing English because he watched TV at home. When Juana went to enroll her child in public school, the questions about her language where asked, but one question that triggered something in the way they put her child was “what languages does the parents speak at home?”, and Juana quickly answered that they spoke in Spanish. The survey lead to the student being placed in an ESL class. According to a teacher on the school the child would learn Spanish and that Juana should be happy.

      In this kind of situations, we can look at it in different spectrums, we might think well maybe this is what the child needs since in facts this child was born in Mexico but was brought here when he was a baby. There are many perspectives as to how this situation can be seen, but I will be analyzing one, seeing that there are many perspectives. Some teachers might say “it’s not racist, we are just trying to help”, and it’s not that what they are doing is wrong, they aren’t wrong for trying to help, many teachers feel the need to help others heart warmly and they don’t see the negative outcomes to what they do. But who is the education system to place a child in a place since they don’t really know the child. The education system has a lot to do in these kinds of situations, certain institutes place children in certain classes based on the way one looks or talks. Teachers might also say that they place children away from L1 (first English) language learners because they might delay the growth of others. But when the education system does this they are limiting the child development into to learning a more fluent way of speaking English. The school system in this case discriminate against the way she looks and judge her by the way she may speak or sound. Juana Martinez didn’t realize she made a huge error when she answered the following question without thinking twice. “Which language is most often spoken by adults in the home?”, this can lead to some people thinking “this isn’t racist, we are just trying to help”. Looking at this and comparing the education system with this case and quote, we can see that its wrong because even though it isn’t being discriminatory directly, what I mean by this is that they aren’t being discriminatory and how she looks or how she speaks, they are still being discriminatory based on a survey that she didn’t know it could affect her. The school can be justifying their actions by saying that if they place him in an all English class it will limit his development in knowing Spanish better, but they can also say that it can limit the development of other children from fully developing English at the pace that they teach.  

 Further on with Juana’s case she went to the school and asked why her child was being placed and there weren’t any concrete answers as to why, but what we did know is that the school would have to decide to change the kind called Omed until he was in 3^rd grade. The child might have been fluent in Spanish and English but the school doesn’t know that. A problem that we can see in Omed’s case is that the schools aren’t seeing that many of these things happens to others and the outcome of these conflicts can cause a lower self-esteem in students to be confident enough to speak, this then leads to the lack of motivation to learn English because there isn’t anybody motivating them. Instead, we judge the way they speak and correct them, and all that leads to systematic stereotyping.

Lippie green says something very important about the way the education teaches standard English, “Much of what the American educational system teaches children about language is factually incorrect; in this it is through, consistent and successful across social and economic boundaries” (Green, Lippie “Accent, standard language ideology, and discriminatory pretext in the courts, Cambridge University Press, 1994).  What green was saying after this is that the school teaches children that there is only one way of speaking English, so the school by placing Qmed elsewhere, they are saying that speaking other languages an accents are overrated. Just as how Green says that social boundaries and we see this happening in Juana’s child, her social placement is being used to place her child in a place her child doesn’t belong in. Omed didn’t have to be placed in this circumstances just because her mother answered a question to quickly to analyze if her child was going to be jeopardize or not.

If we take a look at the statistics of this graph we can see that about 5.5% of the Spanish group to speak English fluently is much larger than any other groups. In Juana’s case she didn’t speak much English as well as her son, wish she might have thought knew a lot of English, but in fact he didn’t because if he did he wouldn’t have been placed in this circumstance.

In conclusion language surveys aren’t always things that we have to take as something light because it can affect the way our child gets their education, they aren’t always clear as to what the intention might be, for the good of the child or the bad.