Language and Power and Aria

In reading the first article,  Aria by Richard Rodriguez, my hear broke the little boy who first felt like he didn't belong in the English speaking world, but then felt like he lost his sense of family and culture when the nuns had asked his family to speak only English in the house and they obliged.  Yes I believe that it is very important to be able to understand and speak English, after all that is our language of "power"  I'm sure Lisa Delpit would agree.  However, I can feel his loss of family values and culture when his family decided to not carry on their Spanish speaking in the home.  My great grandparents spoke Italian.  Of course they were forced to learn English in order to live and work in America, but with them went my families abililty to communicate bilingually.  My grandmother, having to speak English lost alot of her knowledge of the Italian language, my mother and my aunt can understand and speak very little, and my cousins and siblings and I can only swear in Italian.  It's sad when you loose parts of your culture that means so much to you.

But then I read Language and Power by Virginia Collier,  and I have hope that future generations of bilingual families will absolutely learn the language of power, English, but will not loose their values and culture in the process.  I really like that this article gives some answers and advice to those teachers teaching bilingual students, which for the record I have no idea how you do that, it is a very difficult task to accomplish.  But the steps that are provided as a guide in the article are tools that make me hopeful that the author is correct in arguing that it is possible to learn to be part of the American culture without losing the culture that yo are already a part of.  Number 3 on pg 227 is by far my favorite "Don't teach a language in any that challenges or seeks to eliminate the first language".  This is a great goal and I truly hope we can find a way to enforce that culture at home is just as important as culture in school, but that they can be different and still be effective in developing a person.  America is known as being a melting pot, but if we eliminate all of the cultures that make us unique than really we are no different than any other country.