Postmaster Refuses to Serve Non-English Speaking Patrons
While I can empathize with Kumarasiri, I take issue with his characterization of immigrants who don’t speak English. Yet, I’m aware that many Americans have the same views of non-English speakers in the U.S. My perspective on language politics was forever changed when, a decade ago, I accepted a teaching position with the Los Angeles Unified School District straight out of college. My task? To help 30 fourth graders at an elementary school in South L.A. become fluent English speakers.
Most of my students’ parents, who came from Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala, spoke even less English than their children did but routinely implored me to turn their kids into fluent English speakers. That said, the idea that some immigrants are willfully determined not to learn English is ridiculous to me. These parents knew that having their children master English would create countless opportunities. If given the chance to learn English themselves, I have no doubt that the parents would have seized the opportunity to do so. However, most parents were working class or poor and could not pay to take an English class or be tutored in English. The work schedules of parents often impeded them from taking English classes as well, which suggests to me that more businesses which employ non-English speakers should create opportunities for such workers to learn the language.
The other obstacle to learning English is fear. Even the nine and 10-year-olds I taught feared that they would be ridiculed for making mistakes when speaking English. It is a fear that I shared when trying to converse entirely in Spanish with their parents. Wondering if I was rolling my R’s properly or if I was using the subjunctive when I should have been the using the preterite or another tense could all too often trip me up when speaking Spanish. And for Spanish speakers, using words in English that contain the “th” sound or begin with the letter S were just as daunting. The problem is that many of the fears my students had about speaking English were valid.
People in U.S. who speak English with a foreign accent are often dismissed, ridiculed, rudely received or told amazingly that they are not speaking English. These blows to the psyche make it easy for an English language learner to simply withdraw and give up on speaking English.
Because of the chilly reception English language learners receive in the States, I was surprised to visit Spain and Italy several years ago and encounter people who didn’t care if I spoke Spanish and Italian imperfectly. They just wanted to communicate with me because I was a fellow human being. Italians, in particular, went on and on while speaking with me, despite the fact that I couldn’t understand much of what they were saying. But a funny thing began to happen. The more they spoke to me, the more I was able to comprehend and the less self-conscious I felt about attempting to respond to them in Italian. If English speakers want to facilitate a growth in the amount of English being spoken in their communities, they need to embrace non-native speakers of the language rather than shun them.
(Thanks to reader Ama for sending this in!)
(Photo Credit: The Daily Mail, via Raymonds Press)
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