 It's really a big pleasure for me to introduce Dr. Kim Petalski, who we've wanted to have here for quite a few years. I have. She is a professor of Spanish linguistics in the department of Hispanic and Italian linguistics studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And she holds appointments in Latin American and Latino studies, curriculum and instruction, and an affiliation with the Social Justice Initiative. She's directed Spanish for bilingual speakers since 2002 and is the founding director of the summer study abroad program in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she goes every year. Her research focuses on Spanish in the U.S., including factors that influence intergenerational language transmission and change, as well as connections between language and identity, ethnic identity. As a Fulbright scholar, she studied the linguistic and educational experiences of U.S.-raised Mexican youth whose families have returned to Mexico. She has authored and edited over 12 books, including Mexican-Rican Spanish and Identity in Chicago, which is the latest one, and Español de los Estados Unidos, Heritage Language Teaching, Research and Practice, Language Diversity in the U.S., and Language and Identity in a Dual-Version School, and also Dichonacho, which is Spanish language textbook. She's director for the Spanish Heritage Speakers Program. She's the director of Language and Context Research Group, and she's the executive editor of Spanish and Context Journal. Her advocacy for the value of dual-language education in promoting bilingualism and academic achievement was a focus of her TEDx talk in 2013 called No Child Left Monolingual, so please help me. Help me welcome Dr. Steele. Thank you. Thank you so much, Steele. Yeah, that TEDx talk was a fantastic experience. It's a way to get your ideas out there. And last time I looked, it had 38,000 views, and I was so proud because only 37,000 of those were my mother. So the rest were other people. Even she saw and she said my shoes were nice. So that was, I had that going for me. So I'd like to thank Dale for inviting me. In case you didn't know yesterday was Dale's birthday. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Okay, so we're going to celebrate by talking about people in the world. How many people live in the world in addition to Dale? Over seven billion, seven and a half billion people, human beings on this planet. This was the count. Last time I looked, there's this kind of existentially weird, it's a counter that you can look up and it's the number keeps changing, right? Birth, death, birth, death, birth, death. So it's kind of like, whoa, but this was the last number that I saw. This is how many people there are on the planet. We don't know how many of them are bilingual or multilingual. The estimate is between 50 and 65%. Okay, so I'm going to be conservative. I'm going to say 60, 60% of human beings on the planet are bilingual or multilingual. Okay, so what about the U.S.? What percent of the U.S. is bilingual or multilingual? Raise your hand if you think it's zero to 25. Zero to 25? Not many hands. Okay, so you must think it's 26 to 50? Okay, look around, look around at the hands. That's where most of the hands are, 26 to 50. Anybody think 51 to 75? Okay, all right. So you think we're like the rest of the world? 51 to 75? Anybody think 76? Anybody delusional enough? No, she kind of went like this and then she said no. Okay, we don't know. We don't know. The census only asks, do you speak a language other than English in your home? Does that mean you're bilingual? No. Might you speak a language other than English, but not speak it in your own? Yes, so this question is not perfect, but it's all we got. The last time they asked this, it was 19 points. Yeah. Raise your hand, don't cheat. Raise your hand if you were the ones who said under 25. Yeah, okay. I'm not going to applaud you and say yay, because this is terrible. This is not good. I'm not happy that you were right about this, okay? We have a profoundly staunch monolingual culture in this nation. In fact, a lot of people kind of feel like it's not enough for you to speak English. You have to not speak anything else in order to be a true American. This afternoon we were talking about Teddy Roosevelt who said, I ain't running a polyglot boarding house here. Polyglot boarding house, right? Poverty and transience, anything multilingual was bad. The only real American, he said, is a non-hyphenated American who speaks English and nothing else. So this country has not valued bilingualism. This country gets mad if you have to press one to hear English, okay? This country is not all about that, okay? We see that with our children who arrive to school speaking a language other than English, okay? The states determine that their English isn't strong enough for them to be successful in the mainstream U.S. classroom. So what we do is we erase the English from them, okay? We either do this directly through shaming and other kinds of policies or we do it through neglect, neglecting their heritage languages. So one of these things Dale mentioned, the social justice connection with my work, I like to think about the ways in which we could re-envision this nation, right? What if people came here, retain their heritage languages, in addition to learning English, okay? When you think about how much time and money we spend on learning, quote, unquote, foreign or lotte languages other than English, right? It's kind of silly that we get these five-year-olds showing up to school who speak it really, really well and then we don't nurture it and keep it and appreciate it, okay? If you think about it, let's see. Raise your hand if you speak a category one language. It's called closely related to English. This comes from the federal government. People argue about whether it's accurate or not. But so Roman languages, Scandinavian, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Indonesian. Raise your hand if you speak one of those. Okay, so it took you, if you learned it as a second or foreign language, 600 class hours to get basic, like, Don de Salbaño proficiency. 600 hours, it's a lot of money and time, okay? Raise your hand if you're a category two language learner, significantly different from English, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Turkish, Hebrew, Croatian. Wow, okay, that's over a thousand hours of time to ask for the bathroom, okay? Category three, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic. Raise your hand. Anybody? I'm in Arabic right now. I'm the worst student in the whole class. Over 2,000 hours for basic proficiency. This is a lot of time. This is a lot of money. Yeah, what do we do to the five-year-old kid who speaks Arabic and shows up? Do we care about her Arabic? No, we tell her that her Arabic is getting in the way of her acquiring English, okay? So these people who run around saying, these immigrants have to learn English, I agree. I don't know anybody who doesn't agree that it would be a good idea to help immigrants help, not legislate, not shame, but help immigrants learn English. That's a separate thing we could talk about. What's the best way to help them, okay? But when you say that, I'll tell you what, I want them to learn English too. I'm gonna show you some data that suggests that the more you educate these children in their heritage language, the better they will learn English, which is what you say you want, right? Oh yeah, but no, no, no, no, no. No, you can't educate them. No, that's not American. But you just said you wanted them to learn English really, really well. Yes, I do. Then you gotta educate them in their Chinese or in their Spanish. No, no, no, can't have that. So it just reveals this staunch ideology that we have here of monolingualism. We also have people, some who are very, very well intended, some who should know better, who tell parents, oh, you better not speak Spanish to your kid, you better not speak Greek to your kid, you better not speak ex-ish to your child, okay? Raise your hand if you've ever heard somebody say this. No, no, no, no. No habla español con el niño. Don't do it. Okay? These people, I think, fear either that the kid won't learn English as quickly, okay? We have no evidence of this. In fact, there was a study, I believe it was done in Boston, about 500 families. Half of them, the mothers agreed to stop speaking Spanish in the home and shift to English with their kids. Quiero que el niño avance, que aprenda el inglés, I'm gonna shift to English even if my English isn't great. And the other half of the mom said, no, en esta casa se habla español. I'm staying in Spanish. They measured the kid's English vocabulary here later. There was no difference. No difference in the English vocabulary. You know what was different? Spanish vocabulary. The Spanish vocabulary of the kids whose mothers had switched was lower. So you are not helping your kid by not speaking your heritage language to them. And then I think people also give this, again, maybe well-intended advice, right? Because they're afraid that the kid's going to become confused. Que se va a confundir el niño. Right? I had a hairdresser, a Greek lady. I asked her, so how's the Greek going with your daughter? No, no, no, I stopped. I said, why did you stop? Because she was getting confused. And then she was really sorry I was her client because I just went on and on and on and on and on. No, no, no, no, no. Do you remember a couple of slides ago what percent of human beings on the planet are bilingual multilingual? 60. Yeah. Okay. Are they all confused? Probably not. Maybe or more percent of human beings do something. You know what that suggests to me? But that's normal. That our brains were meant to be bilingual or multilingual. We don't know a lot about the brain. We don't know how they're wired. But as Stephen Pinker would say, you know, a spider weeps webs, a fish swim, and humans learn languages. It's what we do. They are not going to get confused. I think they confuse for confusion a very common practice, which is called code switching. We have some code switching experts here in the audience, okay? Code switching is when you go de una lengua a la otra, sometimes you don't even know you're doing it. And there are some people who deny that. Quien, yo, I never do that. I never code switch. You're like, you just... Okay. It is not random confusion. You need strong levels of syntax in both languages. No cierto, Jackie's our expert over here? If you have weak English or weak Spanish, you are not going to code switch, okay? So I get students in Chicago all the time who tell me, con la cola dentro de la pata, I don't speak Spanish. I speak Spanglish. Or I speak Arabic. Or I speak chinglish, que suena grosería, pero no. They're talking about Chinese and English, right? And I always tell them you should be very proud of this. This is not something to be ashamed of. Okay? And in your Spanish for heritage speakers class or your Arabic for heritage speakers class, you can learn, como pulir tu lengua y como hablar de manera más monolingua. But that doesn't mean that the way that you speak should be denigrated in any way. It's just the opposite. It shows your bilingual... Again, 60 or more percent of people do this. It's completely normal. When you measure bilinguals with a monolingual ruler, this is not the way to go about it. And don't believe me. Just look around. I don't know about your social media feeds, but mine just blow up with how cognitive advantages, social advantages. We're smarter. We dress better. We're sexier. That's true. About bilingualism, the average age of onset of Alzheimer's. It's four years later. Sometimes hasta 10 años, después. You know. So we've got... We're not handling our sort of organic native multilingualism very well. What about our foreign or additional non-English language learning and teaching? We're not so red-hot at that either. And when I say this, it's with all due respect to my second language acquisition colleagues who generally agree with what I'm about to say. Well, first I'm going to tell a joke. What do you call a person? You know it's a joke. A person who speaks three languages, the prefix for three is try. So a person who speaks three languages, we call... Try language. Try language. What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Language. Language. What do you call a person who speaks one language? Language. Language. Okay. We know... We know that language learning before approximately 8 to 10, it's not like when you're 10 years old, boom, that's it, goodbye. But more or less, stuff starts to not function the same way it did when you were little, as far as acquisition goes. And that's... It's contested. There's a lot of different things you can say about critical periods, et cetera. But in general, we find these trends, okay? In fact, Arturo Hernandez, does anybody know him or his work? He's right down the road here in Houston and he's doing cognitive neuro-linguistic research. We know so little about the brain. You know what somebody once told me? Here's what we know about the brain. Hang a microphone a mile above Beijing and listen, and that's what we know about the brain. Like, Beijing is the brain and what we know is in that microphone. Yeah? There's a fire over here, there's something over there that we really don't know much. But what Arturo and others say is that when you acquire language earlier in life, it actually goes to a different part of your brain. It is stored differently in your brain and he has termed that organic memory. Okay? So we have years and years and years of top-shelf research that shows this. So what did we decide to do as a country here in the U.S.? Knowing that younger is better. When do we start? 14. 14! Is that a really good time to start? Or does that reflect that monolingual, monocultural ideology that we were saying before? If we really wanted to learn language as well, we wouldn't start at 14, would we? Okay? We wouldn't get people who said, I studied three years of Spanish in high school and I don't remember anything. Now, if you are in this position that you studied X number of years of X and you don't remember anything, I'm not wagging my finger at you and I'm not saying it's your fault. I'm saying there's this system here that happens, right? That we start too late and we do a lot of drill and kill. Okay? We have 40 years of research that say, you know, filling in the blank with yo, boy, tu, vas, ella? It's not the way. It's the way. Years and years I go to Mexico. You know how many times people ask me, yo, boy, tu, vas, ella? Like, never. Right? Yet this still happens. Well, I learned Spanish that way. No, you learned Spanish in spite of the fact that you were taught that way. So, the two problems I've just presented to you can be summed up like this. Language education in the U.S., we neglect or actively erase heritage languages from children. When they turn 14, we're like, orale, orasi, now you can study a language. And we wasted all those years in between when we could be working on their biliteracy development. Okay? And then with our native Anglophone speakers, our monolinguals, okay, we start too late and we frequently focus on grammar, grammar, grammar, grammar, and rather than real life communication. Okay? How can we solve both of these problems? How can we promote early language learning before it, you know, like when it makes sense, okay? As well as heritage language maintenance. There's not a lot of things in this life that you can say, I have the magic bullet right here. And this is one of them. This is one of them. It is dual language education. Dual language education. It's not perfect. It's not a panacea. There are problematic issues that we can discuss later. In fact, I had breakfast this morning with Claudia Cervantes, your colleague over in CNI. And she's, you know, I'm going to give you the 1.0. She's in the 2.0 of dual language. So she can tell you some of the problems involved with it. But I'm just going to cheer lead and tell you the 1.0 parts. And I'm going to start by thinking about our English language learning children, our ELL children. Okay. And I promise I will come back to our Anglophone children. Okay. So when a kid shows up to kindergarten in this country and their English is deemed not strong enough for them to be successful in the classroom, we have to do something. Since 19... When is Lau versus Nichols? 1975. Since 1975, a group of Chinese parents in the San Francisco Bay Area sued the school district and said, yeah, you're talking about equal access. My kid doesn't have equal access to education because she doesn't understand. So the federal government said, and this is shocking to me in this country, the polyglot boarding house, right? Said, you're right. You're right. Schools must do something to help kids who don't know English. What do you have to do? They didn't say. They said, each school, you've got to figure it out. Okay. Here's what most schools do. We have a menu of three options. Option number one is all English, but there must be some kind of support in the form of either ESL or sheltered English instruction. This is what the majority of kids in this country get. The second option is called bilingual. Do you see my quotes? Okay. Bilingual education uses... I'm going to use Spanish here because that's the most common example. About 25% of a day is taught in Spanish. The rest is in English. And it's only in grades K through 3. So why do I use my quotes around bilingual? Because bilingual doesn't have anything. There's nothing bilingual about this kind of bilingual. In fact, the official name of this is called transitional bilingual. The name says it all. Is the goal bilingualism? Nobody cares about that kid's Spanish. Nobody cares about that kid's Chinese. Nobody cares about anything except their English. So Spanish here is used just as a muleta as a crutch until that kid more or less and you take away that crutch and you go to the all-English classroom. There's nothing bilingual about that. If you can get them out in second grade, mejor que se vaya. Am I right or am I right? This is what it is. And the third one is called dual language or two-way language education. This is anywhere from 50 to 90% of a day is taught in Spanish. My kids are in one that's 80% of a day in Spanish. Sometimes one week Spanish, one week English. Sometimes morning Spanish, morning English. Sometimes Monday Spanish, Tuesday English. It varies by the school. Okay? And it goes just as long as you can possibly have it go. My kid's school goes through eighth grade. We were talking earlier today about now they're trying to extend them up through high schools, etc. And what's really interesting about this option here, it's not only for kids like Joaquin who need to learn English. It's also for little Gueritos and Morenitos and Chinitos. Whose parents say, you know what? I don't want to wait. This kid's name is Julian. And his parents said, we don't want to wait until he's 14 to learn Spanish. We're going to put him in a dual-language school. And there's Julian at five like this. 80% of the day is in Spanish, right? And he's in my older son's classroom. When he was in fifth grade, he was reading Harry Potter in Spanish. Okay? So these are parents who get it. They want to cure their family's monolingualism. Let's say. I was monolingual till I was 12 and so I wanted to cure my family. So that's what I did with my kids. Now I show this to parents. I get invited to a lot in Illinois. There's a lot of school districts that want to do dual-language, but they get pushed back. They get pushed back from the Anglophone parents. They get pushed back from the district. Do they get a lot of pushed back from? Latino parents. And I get it. They have suffered for their lack of English. They don't want their kid to suffer for the lack of English. So I'll go to these meetings. They'll invite me. Well, sometimes they don't invite me. I show up anyway. And I say, Okay. De estos tres modelos cual creen ustedes que va a resultar el nivel más alto de español del niño? And what do you think they always say? What's number one? Entre más inglés le hablan al niño más inglés va a aprender. That's obvious. And I say, I know it sounds intuitively correct, but it's wrong. Let me show you some data from Houston. Nice, clean data set from here in Houston. I'm going to show you. I want you to look at the yellow. Las barritas amarillas are going to be the kids in the two-way. The awesome program. I'm not priming you to interpret the results. The blue one is the transitional, the muleta program. The non bilingual bilingual. The red one we didn't talk about. So no se fijen en el rojo. Ignore the red. So they measured kids first, second, third, fourth, fifth grade, English reading. Who is doing strongest in English reading? Two-way. How is it possible que te enseñaron 50% or more en español and you do better in English reading? The date is right here. I didn't make it up. English writing. Lo mismo. La barra amarilla, the dual language kids. Math in English. Esos niños de tercero, son frijoles, they were like way up there. There's also data from California. There's data from New York. I'm going to show you data from Chicago in just a minute. So here's what I say to parents. Quieren que sus hijos aprendan inglés, yo también ponen bilingual in the dual language program. And they're like, what? I'm like, I know. I know it's counterintuitive, but sometimes an answer that's simple is wrong. And the answer that is right is a little more complex. And that's what we're looking at here. This doesn't fit on a bumper sticker. This isn't like Ron Un's in 1998, right? Trying to get rid of bilingual ed in California. English for the children. Who can deny English for the... They're like saying oxygen for the children. Yeah? If you want English for the children, then you'll do this, right? But he sold them just a plate of BS, okay? And if you look around, Stanford, North Carolina, Portland, El Paso Tejas, everywhere you look, that is doing dual language finds the same thing. The Latino achievement gap, which is severe and which is a very big social problem, is being closed or reduced in dual language programs, okay? Now, what won't surprise you as much is the fact that their Spanish is better too, right? When they're in a dual language program, they read better in Spanish. This is the Houston data. They write better in Spanish. And here they're doing better in math in Spanish. Now, the question you got to ask is why? How is this possible, okay? The first one we can pretty much document pretty cleanly is that the kids aren't falling behind. When they show up, some of them manage to sort of make up that gap and then go on. Most of them do not. And every year that gap just gets a little bit bigger, okay? When the kid's there and understands what's going on, once you learn dos más dos son cuatro, you don't have to relearn. Two plus two is four. It just transfers over, right? We know about language transfer and knowledge transfer, okay? So that is one very, very clearly documentable reason. The next reason I'm going to show you, I have no data for. I have no evidence that what I'm about to show you is true. But I believe it with every fiber of my being. And that's why I'm going to show it to you. The home language and identity of the children are respected. Does that make sense? Spanish is no longer seen as a problem that you have to overcome. You're not shamed because of your Spanish. Because of your Spanish. In fact, the little guaritos and morenitos and genitos, they need your Spanish. They are looking to you like, what did she say? I didn't understand. And the guaritos like, what are they? Yo soy el que sabe, right? Does that make sense? You're positioning that child as successful and knowledgeable. And I argue that goes a really long way in their academic achievement as time goes on, okay? Now, what about the home English speaking children? What do you think the number one question I get from their parents is? Like the Julian L. I showed you, right? His parents are like, yeah, I get this. This is awesome. Let's put them in all Spanish, but we just have one question. Hmm? Is his English going to suffer? I'm all about the Spanish. Like that's cool. But if his English is going to suffer, I ain't going to do it. That's the number one question I get. And what we find is that no, not only is their English not suffer, I've seen no case where their English is lower. I have seen cases where their English academic achievement as measured by standardized tests is actually higher. Okay? That's that bilingual advantage that we were talking about earlier. Plus, they learn Spanish. This is what we call in linguistics and social sciences a no-brainer. This is something that we should all be doing, okay? Now, what about their Spanish? What about their Spanish? I showed you this. This is pretty much all we know. Pueden contar en una mano y les sobran dedos. The study's about their Spanish. Why do we have a trillion studies about their English and four studies about their Spanish? Because no one cares about their Spanish. Well, I care. And there are some other people who care. I'm not the only one. So, there's a bunch of us out there doing research. We want to look at their Spanish. It's already been proven that their English is fine. Let's look at what's going on with the Spanish. So, I've got two studies I'm going to talk to you about today. I'm going to try to finish here in 15 minutes. The first one was a true longitudinal study. I followed a bunch of kids in fifth grade. But, I followed them every day recording what they said. And on the playground. And then, oh, my God. And then, when they were in eighth grade, I went back so I could actually see their development. And then, the other study I did was a different school, also in Chicago. And it was pseudo-longitude in the sense that I went in once. And I did first, third, fifth, and eighths. So, the idea is that the eighth graders are future fifth-graders who are future versions of the third graders, et cetera. Right? Salud. So, here is study number one. Somebody sent me this picture. This book is in Japan, apparently. And they sent me this picture so that I could say, hey, my book's in Japan. So, here are the research questions. How much Spanish are they using, right? If 80% of a day is supposed to be in Spanish, right? Social studies. Fifth grade social studies is supposed to be 100% in Spanish. Is that what's happening? That was my question. What does their Spanish look like when they graduate? Can you believe we had... Schools around the country, kindergarten through eighth grade, these kids graduate, cohorts and cohorts, years and years, 25 years of kids graduating from a dual-language school. Not one piece of data about what their Spanish looked like. So, I was like, all right, let's look at this. And I'm really interested in this. You take a little non-Latino kid. The Latino piece is very interesting, and I can talk about that too. But you take a non-Latino kid and have them go through a dual-language school. What is that? How does that rearrange the pieces in their brain as far as who they feel they are? How does Spanish form part of their identity, right? So, what I did, I went to fifth grade Spanish-language arts, supposed to be 100% in Spanish, and social studies. 100% in Spanish, supposed to be. Eight months, 53 hours of recordings, many observations, blah, blah, blah. Here's what I found. Kids are using Spanish about 60% of the time. During class periods, this is just the words that are coming out of their mouth. Okay? So, it's not as high as it should be. Okay? Then I looked at the individual students. Oh, baresto, I had four focal students. Okay? Two of them were heritage speakers, Spanish in the home, boy and a girl. Two of them were second-language learners of Spanish, boy and a girl. I predicted that the Spanish L1 kids would use more Spanish than the Spanish L2 kids' students, right? Is that what I found? Who used more Spanish? The girls. Girls use more Spanish than boys. And I ended up finding out that there's other literature showing that at least at this age, 10, 11-year-old girls like to follow the rules. Carl can tell us that when they get older, that's not the case anymore, right? But at this age, they want to do what the teacher says and they derive a positive sense of identity from being rule followers, right? So they were like, en español, por favor. Or as the boys were like, no, I'm not speaking any Spanish. They didn't get status from Spanish. They got status from talking about boogers and farts and using slang that they didn't know in Spanish. But I argue that even if they did know how to say mocos y pedos, it wouldn't have the same, it wouldn't achieve the same interactional goals that they had. See, you're always jockeying for position, not just boys, boys and girls. Girls got their status from following the rules, getting good grades. Spanish was a part of that. Boys got status from being funny. And Spanish was not a part of that, okay? Then I looked at, by the interlocutor. So when the student speaks to the teacher, 82% Spanish, that made me happy, okay? Because she's the enforcer, right? She can get you in trouble if you don't use Spanish. With each other, 32% of the time, right? And it was mostly the girls. And Espanol, por favor, okay? And then by topic, we were talking about this earlier today, I measured whether you were saying something about the academic task, whether you were talking about boogers or farts, which is off task, or whether you were trying to manage the task. What page are we on? If you ask what page are we on, you're not off task, but you're not really doing the task either. So I called that management. And here's what I found. When you're on task, you're using Spanish, 68% of the time, okay? When you're off task, you're in English. When you're talking about movies and boogers and stuff, 83% English. So this supported previous research by Tyrone and Swain, that immersion classrooms are really very diglossic. Spanish is the H language, curiously, you know. And English is the L language used for informal things, okay? Finally, to talk about their proficiency, I used a whole bunch of different measures to look at their different Spanish proficiency. Here was their oral proficiency. I used the last. Anybody work with last? Language assessment skills? It's not too bad. It's the best thing out there, okay? RA is interesting. RA are recent arrivals. These are kids who had come to Chicago from Latin America within the last four years. So their English wasn't really, they were kind of Spanish monolinguals. Same age as these kids, so I thought it was neat to compare them. What you see is that my heritage speakers are doing pretty well on their oral Spanish. And look at my L2 kids. 64%, that's not too shabby for a kid who showed up five years old knowing nothing about Spanish, okay? So I thought this was pretty nice. I won't have time to read all of these, but here's the L2 girl who was super like en espanol, por favor. This was huge for her. They heard a story about la jardinera and then they had to retell the story, okay? Había una vez una jardinera que se llamaba María Elena. Ella le gustaba, so we're missing some direct object marking. Ella le gustaba plantar y jardinar en su jardín. Pero eso era todo lo que hice. She's got some morphological things, okay? Sus amigos dicieron por qué no tienes novio, por qué nada más trabajas con tus plantas en vez de tener una vida con un hombre. Super heteronormative. The story was awful, awful. Oh, and the worst part was que la vienen a pretender muchos muchachos and she rechaza todos y llega uno que se llama Vicente disfrazado de abuelita y le dice la abuelita tú deberías juntarte con Vicente que es buen muchacho, que no sé qué y te quiere mucho and she's like, yeah maybe you're right and she's like, oh Vicente, I'd be like, bro, you just, no. Me quieres engañar así? No way, but anyway, that's how the story goes. Oh, but she's like, yo te acepto solo si me ayudas en el jardín and he said okay. Anyway, this was the most proficient second language learner in the building. It is great. And now I'm going to show you the least proficient. You can go through nine years of dual language and say, primero, una mujer estaba como se estaba a hacer un jardín like caring for it y todos los hombres le querían y uno de los hombres se guiso y vieja se convenzó or like convinced. Okay, now to be fair, if this kid had gone to an all English school he wouldn't have even understood the story. Much less been able to retell it. Now, are you going to run around saying look at this is what dual immersion does for... he's not your poster child, but it is what it is. It's not that bad. I see some high school Spanish. Now he's only in eighth grade. I know, you're like eight years of Spanish, really? Here's the thing, here's something else that's interesting. As much as this school promoted Spanish as important, you could pass grade to grade to grade to grade to grade with abysmal Spanish. If your English looked like this, oh, there would be an uproar. Okay, here's the most proficient heritage speaker. I mean, she's just like... This girl is just, she's amazing. Here is my lowest proficiency heritage speaker. So he doesn't have gender agreement and the same morphological problems that the L2 boy did, but what I ask myself is what would his Spanish look like if he was in an all-English program? Okay. Written proficiency, we see something very similar. They're a little bit lower here, but my heritage speakers are strong. My recent arrivals are also... Now, you might ask yourself, wait a minute, if these guys are pretty much monolingual in Spanish, shouldn't they be at ceiling? Shouldn't they be at ceiling? Well, this measure measures academic Spanish. That's why your monolinguals are not at ceiling, okay? And we have similar variety. We have the strong L2, the weak heritage, et cetera, et cetera. Okay? Then I gave a little test. En la escuela, no me gusta que los maestros... I'm going for the subjunctive, right? Mi mamá siempre me pide, qué? Finish it. Voy a estar feliz cuando? Finish it. Look how much subjunctive use I got from the L2s. Zero. Oh, sorry, one. One kid, one time. My recent arrivals, 100% subjunctive, as we would expect. My heritage speakers, it really varied according to the context. I forget who I was talking to about. It was Patrick. Where's Patrick? We were talking about subjunctive use and decline. So it really depends on the trigger verb and things like that, okay? I also did a sociolinguistic appropriateness test. I won't have time to talk about it. But so here's my question. What would their Spanish look like had they attended an all-English school? Because you can't say, oh, this looks so strong and wonderful because they were in dual language. Well, you can say that about the L2 kids, right? Because they wouldn't get Spanish anywhere. But the heritage kids who were speaking Spanish at home, maybe their Spanish looks this good, too. Maybe dual language does nothing. That's the null hypothesis, right? So I asked myself, that's me, asking myself that question, what would it look like if they were in an all-English? So this is study number two. Why is it a different building? Why is it a different building? Because the first building, the entire school was dual language. So what I did was I took this data. I went to a school that was no dual language, lots of Latino kids. I gave them the same tests. And you know what their reviewers said? They're two different. They're in different buildings. They're different. You can't compare them. And I'm like, rats. So I found a school where there's one strand that's dual language and one strand that's all-English. So that went right. It's a little more comparable. So reviewer two couldn't tell me that it wasn't good. Here you have the breakdowns. It's like most Chicago schools, very high numbers of students living below the poverty line. Here is our breakdown of students, mostly a Latino school. 7% white kids, my two kids make up half of that 7%. That's there. So my predictions were this. The kids who spoke Spanish in the home in dual language would have better English and math and better Spanish. If they went to the all-English program, it would be lower. That's kind of reasonable. The kids, the L2 kids, because I studied them too, I predicted that those were in dual language. I mean, obviously, if you're in all-English, you have absolutely nothing. I didn't have to measure their Spanish. That would be kind of silly. I gave them Spanish listening. Now remember, again, the yellow is going to be dual language. First, third, fifth, eighth. The kids in dual language, Latino kids in dual language compared to Latino kids in all-English, whose parents said, oh, I want their English to be better. This is what you get. You get lower Spanish. Spanish reading, even lower. Spanish writing, writing takes a long time to analyze. I'm only done with third and eighth grade right now with the actual analysis. But the dual kids have a much higher maximum. My Latino kids in all-English programs, some of them their writing is just not even there. Let me show you an example. Here are Latino children, Spanish-speaking homes, whose parents put them in an all-English program. They had to describe what's happening in the picture. Ellos son comiendo eggs. Él está haciendo eggs. And I didn't just pick the worst kid to show you. This is pretty common. Dad making eggs. This kid can't write anything in Spanish, right? The kid helps dad. If you don't have little kids or work with little kids, you probably can't decipher that. It's been a while for me, but I kind of remember how it goes. Now, what about their peers, whose parents put them in the Spanish program? Están cocinando huevos y tomando jugos. Again, I didn't just take the best kids to show you. Cocinándoles huevos. Cocinándoles. All together. Los niños están limpiando y la mamá está tomando chocolate. El papá está cocinando huevos. I mean, look at this difference. Now, you might say to yourself, okay, can you argue that these kids are comparable? Could it be that the parents who put the kids in the all-English program aren't speaking Spanish at home as much, or don't value Spanish at home as much? That's a very valid question, and I don't really have an answer for that. Here's Quinto Grado. Here's the programa en inglés. Piensen tu actividad favorita. Fútbol con mi sister. Game to play. I mean, and again, remember we said earlier that code switching is not evil or bad. It's a strong good thing, but you were asked here to produce the text all in Spanish. And the fact is that he could not. Okay? The same thing. My brother shows me una guitarra, right? They're having trouble with basic lexicon. And here's the Spanish program. Mi actividad favorito, okay, gender thing, es for square. El primer razón porque me gusta es porque mucho movimiento, por ejemplo. I mean, look at this. And wait, and these were just the Latino kids. Let me show you this little weirdita who showed up to kindergarten or preschool with zero Spanish. She didn't even have enough lines to say everything she needs to say. Upside down. Upside down like Sal. Sal was upside down today. I got a picture of him doing a back flip. So I show this to the parents and say, what kind of Spanish do you want for your kids? And of course they say, well, what about their English? And I say, yeah, no. English is fine. This is from these same kids. Okay, the park and the NWA, both of which are awful. Fifth grade English. And eighth grade English. So to wrap up summary, dual immersion programs contribute to strong Spanish among both Latino and non-Latino students. There's no significant cost to their English or math achievement. Sometimes there's actually advantages. And there are people lined up, mostly white parents, lined up around the nation who want to put their kids in these programs. Okay. Illinois just were the fourth state to pass the seal of biliteracy. I didn't do my homework. Does Texas have the seal of biliteracy? You do? Good. This is something that goes on your high school diploma that certifies not only are you bilingual, you're biliterate. And employers are now starting to get the memo that this is something that they should look for. Dual language positions you to reach the seal of biliteracy. And I'm going to say one final note about bilingual child development, because I have had parents come up to me and say, I looked at my second grader and I looked at my friend's second grader and my son's English was behind her son's English in second grade. And I'm very worried. So I tell them the story of the three little pigs. You know the story of the three little pigs? Que la mamá los bota de casa y el primero sale y de qué hace su casa. De paja. That house goes up quick. This is like ESL. This is the ESL program. All English. That house goes up quick. But is it strong? Okay. El segundo servito de qué hace la casa? De palos. This is bilingual. Entre comillas. Education. Transitional. Thank you. This is transitional bilingual education. It does take a little longer to build the English house. So if you're a second grade parent and you're looking at your comadres kid in second grade and you say, ay por Dios tiene la casa con techo y mi hijo solo tiene paredes. I made a mistake. Voy a sacar a mi hijo de bilingüe and put him in all English. Porque mira al hijo de la comadre. Okay. I say, wait. You're kids in second grade. You've got to give them time. And what does the third servito do? Padrillo. This is dual language. This is your dual language program right here. So if you have a dual language mom you go, ay por Dios. Este niño tiene la casa con to y techo y este niño tiene la casa con paredes y mi hijo solo tiene la fundación. I made a big mistake. Why did I listen to that lady, that professor? I'm pulling my kid out immediately. And I say, pero qué pasa cuando viene el lobo? ¿En el lobo aquí qué representa? El lobo aquí representa low levels of English, loss of Spanish, academic failure. It's a leap of faith. You have to wait. And when your kid is in second third grade don't freak out. If your kid looks to be a little behind the head they won't always, but sometimes they do. So I feel like I need to say that so that you understand that that can happen, okay? The research shows it everywhere that there are clear cognitive, academic and employment advantages to bilingualism and what we need are more dual language programs. Thank you very much. ¿Y me pueden hacer like in Facebook? Is he kidding? Yeah. Identity in language. Yes. So we saw that the girls were more invested in the boys. The young Anglo girl who was super invested in Spanish, she had an aunt who had married a Mexican man and she called him her tío and she just adopted this identity. She really wanted this. I think her whole family had just been so mono, lingual mono, cultural mono, everything that she really embraced this opportunity and the other kids would get annoyed with her because during group work when the teacher wasn't around they would all go to English and she would be the one to be like en español por favor. She would say to one kid that's why we're here, you know that's why we're here to learn Spanish. She wanted a quinceañera. This girl, this was about her identity. Now, when you do qualitative research you can't extrapolate to everybody. Okay, I can just present you the four kids that I saw. The Latino boy that I saw was very funny and he was much more interested in gaining status through being funny. Spanish was not a part of that. In fact bragging about how I don't do bus, I don't do homework, I do bus work. He does his homework on the bus. Yeah, so that was just part of his identity. So I guess what I found interesting was that I assumed that the Latino kids would have Spanish as a bigger part of their identity. They would use it more and appreciate it more but it was occasionally the L2 kids. I think for the very reason that they didn't have it like facilmente hay en casa that they extended it. When they got to eighth grade it was a little different. I mean, eighth graders, come on. They're not interested in anything that schools got to talk about. I know it's not a very complete answer but it was just the four kids whose identity I looked at, yeah. And that's why a few people do qualitative ethnographic research. It takes so long and you got to publish stuff and get tenure. So, you know, I didn't go back to look at more of that. But I guess my argument would be all the fun stuff in the building was in English. Gym was in English. Music was in English. All the specials were in English. Wouldn't it be a good idea to have fun stuff be in Spanish? Wouldn't that contribute, right? Because they get a lot of their identity through their fun stuff, right? And I have to tell you at my kids' school now it's the same thing. Art is in English. Art is in English. Gym is in English. Drama is in English. I'm just glad that they have music and art and drama. I mean, who has that? Who has that? They have recess, too. Yeah, recess, well. It's in whatever they want, I guess, whatever they want. Yeah. Yes, in the back. You know, that's an excellent question and I didn't look at that in the school that had both. But I can tell you about the school where the whole building was dual and I can compare it to some other contexts I've heard of. If you're familiar with Guadalupe Valdez's piece from 1997, she really cautioned against dual language programs using Latino kids as input for the second language kids. And so the one thing that Latino kids had, right, suffering, you know, poverty, marginalization, all kinds of things, the one thing that they had was their Spanish. And that dual language program was effectively giving it away to the oppressor so that they could then use it, right? And she told an anecdote of a kid on a playground. I think he was in fifth grade, the little redheaded kid, do you remember this? And he got mad at a little Latino boy and he's like, well, the only reason the school exists is because I'm here. You know? And I've seen school districts that only when the white parents get involved will they form the dual. When the white parents demand it, then they form it and then they go looking for the Latino guy. There's icky, icky dynamics that can't happen. I can tell you this though, at that particular, and I've also heard of schools, dual language schools where the dynamics are icky like that between the two groups of students, right? At the school I was at, they were very, very, very well integrated. They got it. They got the social justice mission of the school. They really did. And I can tell you, that's all I can tell you to answer that question. So there's at least one example of where it is like cumpliendo con esa misión because there's three general missions of a dual language school, right? It's bilingualism, biliteracy, and cross-cultural competence. Although Claudia and her colleagues are proposing a fourth one, which is a critical language awareness, which I think is very important. So that's a piece of evidence that shows that that can be there. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that if our language schools are already walking in, if they could code-switch and trans-language like they naturally do in these kinds of programs, that they would maybe have a better sense of positive identity? Because you mentioned that in your study, they did what they did. And I'm wondering if they were able to do that, that maybe they would have either language practices as a work out. Right. They did trans-language. A lot of these kids, they are BFLA bilingual first language acquisition, so they do show up bilingual. And they absolutely did trans-language. And they wouldn't like get in trouble for using English during Spanish time or Spanish during... Well, they never use Spanish during English time. They don't. But this is where yo discrepo con Ophelia Garcia y compañía with the whole trans-languaging. Like, I get trans-languaging, it happens, it's natural, it's there. I feel like... And I'm not exactly where I shouldn't speak for her. I'll just say that Spanish we know is a minoritized language. And if we don't create protected spaces where it is expected, protected spaces where it is expected, English creeps in no matter how badly we try to keep it out. If we just say, okay, trans-languaging all day for everybody, I don't think their Spanish will develop. Now your question, that wasn't your question. Your question was, would it be good for their identities to have them trans-languaged? Well, they already do trans-language. Maybe what you're asking is if it's more sanctioned? Well, I think what I observed it is in both schools. If they're participating and saying the right answer, it's not never a bad thing if they said it in the other language ever. So in that sense, it is valued. So maybe I'm sort of not answering your question, but using it as an excuse to say that I think there's great value in having monolingual spaces. Not all day, but some of the day. And I don't mean put shock collars on them if they use the wrong language, obviously. You know, my kids maybe, but nobody else. There was a, yeah, back over there? Yes, absolutely. And this goes back to this other comment. Thank you for talking about things I want to talk about. As I said earlier, some of these schools they have the model and the same teacher in the morning teaches in English and in the afternoon teaches in Spanish. I'm not a big fan of that. If I'm giving my choice, I'm going to prefer that you have one teacher with whom you have a monolingual relationship in English and another teacher with whom you have a monolingual relationship in Spanish whom you would never, ever dirigirte en inglés. I think that would go a long way. Because, yeah, the kids know that the teacher knows English because she teaches half a day in it. So, yeah, the kids are a little more complacent or their idea, whatever the issue might be, they're not forced to use the language. And let's face it, language acquisition is about being forced. It's about need. It's about I must. And if you don't create that must, the minority language won't develop. I think, yeah. So we'll go here and then there. Yeah? Especially in California schools that have both programs, it seems that those that choose the dual language have higher Right. That's an excellent point. You're absolutely right. You are right. But this school, you know, those who weren't free or reduced lunch were just maybe a little bit above. This is a very 98% homogenous. No, in the one that the whole building was dual, there was a lot more income variety. You had a lot of wealthy white families because of where the school was located. And you had a lot of wealthy, Latino families, third generation Latino families too. But here, sure. I mean, yeah, it's going to affect the building and how things happen and what resources are available, et cetera. But I mean, these kids, Spanish was better because they're recent arrivals and children of immigrants. For sure. Sorry. Yeah. Each student that they struggle with language learning, would you recommend this dual program for them? Thank you for asking that. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for asking that. I keep meaning to put a slide in about that. Remember we talked about a 60 or 65% of people on the planet are bilingual? In that 60 to 65%, there are people with learning disabilities. There are people with speech and hearing issues. There are kids of all stripes, people of all stripes. I can recommend a book. Her last name is Fortune, like Fortune Cookie. Tara Fortune has a book called Something Y'all Know I'm Bad with Titles. The struggling learner in dual language or something like that, where she talks specifically about kids who have IEPs, kids who have different types of learning issues. Even the case of children who speak a minoritized variety of English. So speakers of African-American English, who are encountering not only a new language in Spanish, but also a new dialect in mainstream US English. So that might be a good resource for you to check out. But the short answer is yes, these programs. You have to support those kids, obviously. But yeah, those kids can and are successful in these programs all the time. I have not studied other languages. There's a man whose name is Fabrice Jomon. And he's in New York. I think he has, like, six clones. Because everywhere you look, Japanese dual language program, there's a picture of Fabrice Jomon behind it. Italian dual language, Korean dual language, they're springing up all over New York. And Fabrice Jomon is always in the picture. So they're just barely getting off the ground. So now we need researchers who have the willingness and the tools to actually study them. The only research I'm aware of is on Spanish. Right. That's an excellent question. Well, we're seeing positive signs in the 20-year ban in California on bilingual ed, which was recently overturned. I mean, we still have Arizona and Michigan. Yeah, there's, I guess, a number of different ways. 31 states are officially English only, or official English states. So that's something that you can try to work against. We tried to work against that in Chicago right before Mayor Daley left office. I'm part of a group called Multilingual Chicago. We wrote up an ordinance that says Chicago is a multilingual city, and he signed it. Now, how do you have a multilingual city in an English-only state? Well, we were fighting symbolism with symbolism. That was our point. So if you live in an official English state, start rattling some cages. Start getting that to change. Sometimes the fight is district-wide. Sometimes it's school by school. You know, the people who I've seen be most successful about this are people with kids who want dual language for their kids. They're the ones with the horse and the race, and so they're banging on doors and trying to get this. And I've seen moms in Illinois who fight so hard, and then their kids just keep getting an older and older. And by the time the school puts the dual language program, the kids are too old. But they're still fighting anyway. So if you think you ever might reproduce, get started now. Are there enough teachers? There are not enough teachers. The question is, are there enough teachers? No. My language teachers are. There are not enough teachers. There are... I don't know who's going to see this video. I can say it anyway. There is a company, VIF. Is that what they're called? For-profit group that imports teachers from Spain and other countries. And not that these can't be wonderful teachers, but we should be home-growing our own teachers. And then are they prepared? How many colleges and universities actually offer coursework that prepares you to be a dual-language school? None that I know. That's not true. There are some out there, but my university does not have one. They learn on the fly. If they're lucky, they student-teach there, and then they become teachers. They go to La Cosecha. Have you ever heard of La Cosecha? La Cosecha is the conference. Every year, it's in Nuevo México. Alterna entre Albuquerque y Santa Fe. And it's in Octubre or Noviembre. This year, Noviembre and Albuquerque. It starts on Halloween, though. That was not well thought out. Those of us who have to take kids' trick-or-treating, we have to miss the first day. Yes. Did you hear that? You prepare dual-language teachers here.