These sections of the textbook
are focused on giving the reader an historical and statistical
perspective on the phenomena of non-native English speakers in America
and the general way in which English learners today and in the past
have been assimilated over time into English speaking culture.
"Diversity: Bilingualism American Style" gives a pretty comprehensive statistical view of the number of immigrants and English learners currently in the American school system and compares this with the number of such students in America in the past. It also gives related data about dropout rates for various ethnic groups and statistics about cross correlations between student success rates and student proficiencies as monolingual or bilingual speakers from the first to the third generations of immigrants.
What I found especially enlightening about this reading was the percentage of the U.S. population that was foreign-born in the decades between 1850 and 2000. It is interesting when looking at the data that the period between the 1940's and the 1990's are something of an historical anomaly in American history in that immigration was actually lower then (in percentage terms) than at any other time in the last 150 years. This leads the reader to understand that high immigration rates aren't a new problem in America - just a problem that our generation has little experience with because of the lull in immigration during that 50 year period. [This lull was caused by the tight laws in effect between the time that the national origins quota system was established in 1924 and then ended in 1965.]
I think the main point worth taking away from this reading is that a
large immigrant population is nothing new - and that in general
immigrant families are pretty fully assimilated into English speaking
culture by the third generation - so there is really very little reason
to panic over "the disappearance of English culture in America"
etc. Of course the problems that we teachers must face meantime
teaching first generation English speakers is another issue, but that
is what the rest of the semester will deal with (I presume).
I would like to see more data and discussion about the educational success rates of the different ethnic sub-cultures in America. The table on immigrant dropout rates on page xix shows a large discrepancy between different ethnic groups even among the English proficient population. The Black and Mexican populations have a 16 and 24 percent dropout rate respectively, while the Asian dropout rate is amazingly low compared even to the "Non-Hispanic White" dropout rates (4.5 and 12 percent respectively). How can we as educators, and as a society in general, find a way to raise the academic success rates of the lagging groups?
This will be the real challenge of the 21st century which will
continue beyond the relatively transient problem of dealing with first
generation English language learners.