Priorities in Instituting the Teaching of English As a Second Language in a Southwest Texas School

Abstract

This is the history of a small step one Texas school took toward better education for Latin-American students who had been denied the equality of opportunity which is America's traditional promise. This simple story is told for the encouragement of other schools which must begin their journeys to educational equality at the same point. For this one began, as theirs must, from a point of almost total disregard of the second-language problems of a ninety percent Spanish-speaking student body in a district which at that time was still using instructional methods and texts identical to those of schools whose total school population were native speakers of English. It is possible that taking the first small step required more determination and singlehearted effort than will many of the miles yet to go. To understand the sequence of steps taken, one must know the local conditions which dictated priorities. The following are elements of the local situation as I saw them after I had been in the district as supervisor for two years. The teachers were not trained in second-language teaching. Faculty members laid the blame for the poor academic progress of Spanish-speaking students at the doors of their parents: They'll never learn to speak English if they don't speak it at home! This frequently-voiced suggestion for solving the language problem, offered with a straight face, registered a lack of training, an unawareness of the nature of language, and a necessary hardening of the heart toward the plight of the children. Hardening was necessary if a teacher was to return day after day to a defeating classroom. As in many schools of this area, the faculty was marked by its number of non-degree teachers, its many teaching outside their fields of training, its many who had had no fresh college training for ten, fifteen, or twenty years, and its large annual turn-over in staff. One or two teachers held membership in professional organizations other than the Texas State Teachers Association and the Classroom Teachers Association, both of which must be classified, on the local level, as being essentially politically-oriented rather than curriculum-directed bodies. When I first came to the district, there was no local supervision and no inservice training program. The word was laissez faire, i.e., indifference coupled with and encouraged by administrative non-interference which both reflected and reinforced the prejudice existing between the socially and economically dominant Anglo minority