Alternative Method of Bilingual Education
1 In this peer reviewed journal article “A Speech Community Model of Bilingual Education: Educating Latino Newcomers in the USA” written by Ofelia Garcia and Lesley Bartlett the authors find a way to address the current problem of bilingual education in the US. They do so by conducting a qualitative case study at a segregated bilingual high school for Latino newcomers. They base their study off of a community high school in New York by the name of Gregorio Luperon High School. This specific school has a majority of Dominican students in a city with one of the highest drug and …show more content…
The school opened back in 1991 when a group of Dominican immigrants joined together to find a way to make acquiring English an easier process for latino immigrant youth. They wanted a solution to the extremely high failure rates of latino youth in the New York City School systems. This school began as just a couple month program before students were put into main stream schools but eventually in 1999 turned into an actually high school. This school comes from a neighborhood that has a majority of Dominicans, as well as one of the highest city crime rates, right behind Harlem. This Schools instructors are also all highly qualified immigrant Dominicans who can relate and connect to their students on a whole different …show more content…
Also by segregating these students the English they acquire is still limited and from what they gain being in this program they lose by not being around english native speakers. Is this english they acquired from this model enough to get them a job? Do any of these students continue their education and go to College? If they do get a job and continue their education is their English strong enough that they will succeed not only academically but in Society and in their Community? These are all questions I would have liked to see answered in this article written by Garcia and Bartlett. Some sort of paragraph where they addressed the “Aftermath” of this study. They did a great job focusing on the model and why and how it was successful and even what the success rates were but I wish they could have followed up a year or so later on students and found where they were at in life. Doing this I believe would have given the study more credibility, allowing me and other readers to see that this program did not just help the students over this school year but continued to carry on and help them succeed academically and in Society as