“NO CHILD LEFT MONOLINGUAL” by KIM POTOVSKY.

The sixty per cent of the world’s populations are bilingual or multilingual, but in USA, with a lot of immigrants,  only the twenty per cent speaks another language which’s not English. With this idea starts Kim Potovsky. She affirms that “USA promotes the monolingualism”. How is that? In that country, they have some myths about learning new languages:

First, they think that MULTILINGUALISM damages SOCIETY: in their opinion, immigrants aren’t learning English and it’s quite the opposite because they are learning more English and faster than in the past. The seventy per cent of the immigrants speak it well or very well, and this is with no much help from the country.

The world’s is changing; USA was a country that received a lot of immigration from Mexico, now they are changing roles:  Mexico receives immigration from its big neighbour; the same happens in Italy, which is welcoming more immigrants too. For this change, USA population has to make up their minds, better said, open their minds and promote a bilingual country, as Potovsky says “English + Nation”.

Under their point of view, the MULTILINGUALISM damages INDIVIDUALS; this is the second myth sustained. They think that leaving your heritage language is going to accelerate your English learning, and again is the opposite: the more instruction you received in your heritage tongue the better you are going to do with English.

She talks about some educational programs, which go from ones who only use English to some that use English and other language in different levels:

-          English Only: they only speak in this language.

-          Bilingual: with 25% Spanish and 75% in English.

-          Two-way immersion (some learn English and some learn Spanish).

For her, the last one  is the perfect one because they learn both languages; the first years they speak ten per cent in English and the ninety per cent in Spanish, but as they are growing up, they use the fifty percent each language.

She also thinks that it’s a shame that in USA, they start learning a foreign language in high school at the age of fourteen. This idea leads to another one which is the thought of confusing children with more than one language when they are in the kindergarten. As she defends, that’s another myth, another mistake because she works in a project called SATURDAY SCHOOL, in which children learn the mother tongue of their family, and she is witness of how they can learn another language without a problem. She ends saying that we have to use also the media resources to achieve the ORGANIC BILINGUALISM that USA needs because learning languages is learning more cultures and there they have plenty of them.

Talking about Catalonia, we have two languages in the school (Catalan and Spanish) and, in general, we learn a third one which is English. To become a trilingual country we would need to use the third program mentioned by Potovsky “Two-immersion”, but we live in a bilingual country and I think that in some schools is enough to learn Catalan, because we have also a lot of immigration.  So, in my opinion, Potovsky’s program is good to apply in here if all the children would have the same level as in Spanish as in Catalan.