The Education of Language Minority Immigrants in the United States

By Terrence G. Wiley, Jin Sook Lee, Russell W. Rumberger

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2009 Terrence G. Wiley, Jin Sook Lee and Russell W. Rumberger and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84769-210-8

Contents

Acknowledgements,
Contributors,
Introduction Terrence G. Wiley and Jin Sook Lee,
1 A Language Graveyard? The Evolution of Language Competencies, Preferences and Use among Young Adult Children of Immigrants Rubén G. Rumbaut,
2 The Economics of Language for Immigrants: An Introduction and Overview Barry R. Chiswick,
3 Immigration, Race and Higher Education Outcomes Christine Qi Liu, Robert H. Tai and Xitao Fan,
4 Immigrant Youth in High School: Understanding Educational Outcomes for Students of Mexican Origin Regina Cortina,
5 A Synthesis of the Roles of Heritage Languages in the Lives of Children of Immigrants: What Educators Need to Know Jin Sook Lee and Debra Suarez,
6 Assimilation and Resistance: How Language and Culture Influence Gender Identity Negotiation in First-Generation Vietnamese Immigrant Youth Diem T. Nguyen and Tom Stritikus,
7 Agentive Youth Research: Towards Individual, Collective and Policy Transformations Kathryn A. Davis,
8 The Need for Multiple Measures in Reclassification Decisions: A Validity Study of the Stanford English Language Proficiency Test Kate Mahoney, Tom Haladyna and Jeff MacSwan,
9 Immigrant Students, English Language Proficiency and Transitions from High School to Community College George C. Bunch,
10 Commentary: Language, Immigration and the Quality of Education: Moving Toward a Broader Conversation Guadalupe Valdés,
Author index,
Subject index,

CHAPTER 1

A Language Graveyard? The Evolution of Language Competencies, Preferences and Use among Young Adult Children of Immigrants

RUBÉN G. RUMBAUT

Introduction

This chapter examines the evolution of English and foreign language competencies, preferences and use among young adult children of immigrants in the United States, including the extent to which bilingualism is sustained or not over time and generation in the United States. It focuses on the last wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), which followed a sample of 1.5- and second-generation youth — that is, immigrant children who arrived in the United States before adolescence and US-born children of immigrants — in Southern California and South Florida for more than a decade from mid-adolescence in 1992 to their mid-20s. The baseline sample of more than 5000 was representative of 77 nationalities, including all of the principal immigrant groups in the United States today. The CILS data set permits both comparative and longitudinal analyses of language fluencies across the largest immigrant groups in the United States, from widely different national, cultural and class origins, in distinct generational cohorts and in different areas of settlement. The analysis will be supplemented with newly available data from the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) survey, which collected equivalent data on language and education from a multigenerational sample of nearly 5000 respondents in their 20s and 30s in the five-county greater Los Angeles area, primarily from the 1.5 and second generations but adding sizable subsamples of third, fourth and later generations.

Before turning to the results of these studies, however, we begin first by briefly considering the issue in a broader historical context and then examine recent data on generational patterns of language loyalty and change in the United States, sketching a national profile of foreign and English language patterns over the past three censuses.

The issue is of more than academic or practical significance. In the United States, a country lacking centuries-old traditions and receiving simultaneously millions of foreigners from the most diverse lands, language homogeneity came to be seen as the bedrock of national identity. Immigrants were not only expected to speak English, but to speak only English as a prerequisite for social acceptance and integration. Such concerns over language loyalty go back to colonial times. Benjamin Franklin, alarmed about German newcomers in colonial Philadelphia, put it this way as early as 1751: ‘[W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion?’ The sentiment was echoed a century and a half later by Theodore Roosevelt (1918): ‘We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language; for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouse’. And most recently, during the present era of mass migration, the United States has seen a proliferation of states adopting official English laws and dismantling bilingual education programs, and of candidates for national office denouncing bilingualism as a threat to national unity and security.

Although it may seem otherwise from an American perspective, the use of two languages is not exceptional, but is normal, in the experience of a good part of the world’s population. In the world today, more than six billion people, living in about 200 nation-states, speak an estimated 6000 languages. There are roughly 30 times as many languages as there are states, and the dominance of certain languages (such as Chinese, Hindi, Spanish and English) — facilitated by global communications and transportation technologies, international trade and immigration — contributes to the proliferation of bilingualism. Over the past two centuries, the United States has incorporated more multilingual people than any other country in the world. Yet the American experience is remarkable for its near mass extinction of non-English languages: In no other country, among 35 nations compared in a detailed study by Lieberson et al. (1975), did the rate of mother tongue shift toward (English) monolingualism approach the rapidity of that found in the United States. Immigrants of minority languages shifted to English at a rate far in excess of that obtained in all other countries.

Other studies of the languages of European and older Asian immigrant groups in the United States have documented a rapid process of intergenerational ‘Anglicization’ that is effectively completed by the third generation. Bilingualism, American style, has been unstable and transitional — at least until recently. The general historical pattern seems clear: Those in the first generation learned ‘survival’ English, enough to get by, typically with telltale accents, but continued to speak their mother tongue at home. The second generation grew up speaking the mother tongue at home but English away from home — above all, in the public schools and then in the wider society, given the institutional pressures for Anglicization and the socioeconomic benefits of native fluency in English. The home language of their children (i.e. the immigrants’ grandchildren), and hence the mother tongue of the third generation, was mostly English. As Nahirny and Fishman saw it in a classic essay (1965), immigrant families were often transformed ‘into two linguistic sub-groups segregated along generational lines … ethnic heritage, including the ethnic mother tongue, usually ceases to play any viable role in the life of the third generation … [the grandchildren] become literally outsiders to their ancestral heritage’.

A National Profile

Does this historical pattern continue to apply even today? What is the contemporary evidence concerning both the extent of bilingualism in the United States and its resilience over time? The 1980, 1990 and 2000 censuses asked people aged five or older if they spoke a language other than English at home. In 2000, 47 million people or 18% of the 262.4 million aged five years or older answered in the affirmative. Those figures were up from 14% in 1990 (32 million) and 11% in 1980 (23 million). Because the question did not include whether this was the ‘usual’ language spoken at home or how frequently or how well it was used relative to English, it probably elicited an overestimate. Still, the data point to the presence of a substantial and growing minority of those who are not English monolinguals.

Those growing linguistic minority populations were concentrated in areas of primary immigrant settlement — particularly along the Mexican border from Texas to California and in large cities such as Chicago, Miamiand New York. Among all the 3141 counties in the United States, the median percentage of the population who spoke a language other than English at home was a mere 4.6%. This means, in half of all the counties — a vast swath of the United States — more than 95% of the residents were English monolinguals. In other areas, however, bilingualism was prevalent — as was the case in Hialeah and Miami in South Florida; Santa Ana and East Los Angeles in Southern California; Laredo, McAllen, Brownsville and El Paso along the Texas-Mexico border and Elizabeth, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City, where 67–93% of the residents speak languages other than English.

In 2000, of the 47 million who spoke a foreign language at home, more than 28 million spoke one language: Spanish. The other 18 million spoke scores of different languages, chiefly reflecting both past and present immigrant flows. These languages included Chinese (2 million); French, German, Italian, Tagalog and Vietnamese (over 1 million each) and Korean, Russian, Polish, Arabic and Portuguese (over 500,000 each). Among all immigrants aged five years or older who came to the United States between 1990 and 2000, 88% spoke a language other than English at home. The figure declines to 74% among pre-1980 immigrants and to less than 9% among the native born. The vast majority of the population, over 215 million, spoke only English.

What does the census tell us about linguistic variability within national groups and about the evolution of bilingualism over time? Table 1.1 presents data on home language use and related characteristics for the largest non-English immigrant cohorts; the total pre-1980, 1980–1989, and post-1990 foreign-born populations and the native born. Two main conclusions can be derived from these results. First, recently arrived immigrants tend to remain loyal to their native language, regardless of age and education. Although there is some evidence that nationalities with high proportions of college graduates and professionals shift toward English more rapidly (Portes & Rumbaut, 2006), the vast majority of recent arrivals retains its own language at home. Second, time has a strong eroding effect on native language retention: As seen in the bottom rows of the table, only one-eighth of recently arrived immigrants use English only at home, but more than one-fourth of immigrants with longer US residence do so.

Even more impressive is the rapidity with which English fluency is acquired by immigrant children, underscoring the importance of age at arrival. As shown in Table 1.2, among immigrants who arrived in the United States as children under 13 years of age and who speak another language at home, 64% could speak English ‘very well’, compared to 35% of those who immigrated between the ages of 13 and 35 (in adolescence or early adulthood) and to only 20% of those who were 35 or older when theyimmigrated. In general, age at arrival, in conjunction with time in the United States and level of education, are the most significant predictors of the acquisition of English fluency among immigrants of non-English origin. The effect of each of these three factors is specified in Table 1.3 for the largest immigrant nationalities.

Indeed, concerning the acquisition of the English language by non-English-speaking immigrants, it is important to point out that there is a biological basis for language learning which helps explain why young children can pick up a new language so quickly. Essentially, the capacity to learn to speak a language like a native is a function of age, and it is especially good between the ages of three and the early teens; immigrants who arrive before the age of 12 or so (the 1.5 generation) are considerably more likely to speak English without an accent, while those who arrive after puberty may learn it, and even learn it fluently, but rarely without a telltale accent. According to Lennenberg (1967: 53), ‘After puberty, the ability … to adjust to the physiological demands of verbal behavior quickly declines. The brain behaves as if it had become set in its ways and primary basic language skills not acquired by that time, except for articulation, usually remain deficient for life’ (see also Bialystok & Hakuta, 1994; Laponce, 1987; Singleton & Lengyel, 1995; Zuckerman & Kahn, 2000).

Generational Patterns: Cross Sectional Studies

The power of acculturative forces is nowhere clearer than in the linguistic shift across generations over time. Until recently, however, there were scarcely any systematic three-generation analyses of language maintenance and shift in the research literature. A 1973 study by David López (1978) involved a survey of a representative sample of 1129 Mexican-origin couples in Los Angeles. His findings document a pattern of rapid language transition across the three generations that contradicts the assumption of the unshakable Spanish language loyalty among Mexican Americans. Among first-generation women, for example, he found that 84% used only Spanish at home, 14% used both languages and only 2% used English solely. By the third generation, there was almost a complete reversal, with only 4% speaking Spanish at home, 12% using both and 84% shifting to English only.

Figures for men were similar, except that the first-to second-generation shift to English was still more marked. The study also attempted to examine the determinants and consequences of language transition. It found that generation had the strongest causal effect, exceeding by far those of age, rural origin and other predictors. Maintaining fluency in Spanish appeared to have some positive occupational advantages — controlling for education and other factors — among the immigrant generation, but none for subsequent ones. Among the latter, residual Spanish monolingualism was associated with poor schooling and low socioeconomic status. López concluded that the appearance of high language loyalty among Mexican Americans is largely due to the effect of the continuing high immigration from the country of origin.

Three recent studies of intergenerational language shift — that is, of change in linguistic proficiency and use patterns from the immigrant generation to that of their US-born children and grandchildren — provide convergent and compelling contemporary evidence of the three-generation model of mother-tongue erosion from the adult immigrant generation to that of their grandchildren. The first is an innovative analysis of the 2000 census by Richard Alba et al. (2002) focusing on children aged 6–15 years. The second is a national survey of Hispanic adults conducted in 2002 by the Pew Hispanic Center (2004). The third is a new study — the IIMMLA survey, previously mentioned, to be described in more detail below (Rumbaut et al., 2005).

The first of these studies analyzed the home languages of school-age children (ages 6–15) in newcomer families, as reported in the 2000 census, linking children to their parents in the same household to permit distinguishing between the second-generation (US-born children with at least one foreign-born parent) and the third (or a later)-generation (US-born children with parents who are also US born). Despite group differences in the degree of language shift, for every nationality without exception, the following patterns are clear: The vast majority of first-generation immigrants who come to the United States as children speak English well; bilingualism is most common among second-generation children, who grow up in immigrant households and speak a foreign language at home, but are almost all proficient in English; English-only is the predominant pattern by the third generation; and what third-generation bilingualism exists is found especially in border communities such as Brownsville and El Paso, Texas, where the maintenance of Spanish has deep historical roots and is affected by proximity to Mexico or in areas of high ethnic densities, such as found among Dominicans in New York and Cubans in Miami. Away from the border, Mexican-American children of the third generation are unlikely to be bilingual.

The second study entailed a national telephonic survey of a representative sample of adults, 18 years and older, in the 48 contiguous states, of whom 2929 self-reported as Hispanic or Latino (including respondents from all of the 19 Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America). Unlike the census (which asks only about spoken proficiency in English), the respondents were asked about their ability to speak and read in both English and Spanish. On the basis of their answers they were classified as Spanish dominant, bilingual or English dominant. The breakdown of the results by generation — which uncannily parallel those of Lopez’s Los Angeles survey taken three decades earlier — are shown graphically in Figure 1.1. First-generation adults were overwhelmingly Spanish dominant (72%), with a fourth classified as bilingual and only 4% classified as English dominant. This pattern was reversed by the third generation, with 78% being English dominant and 22% still classified as bilingual, but less than 1% could be deemed Spanish dominant. Among the second generation, Spanish dominance plummeted to only 7%. However, nearly half (47%) were classified as bilinguals and nearly as many as English dominant (46%) among the second generation.

(Continues…)Excerpted from The Education of Language Minority Immigrants in the United States by Terrence G. Wiley, Jin Sook Lee, Russell W. Rumberger. Copyright © 2009 Terrence G. Wiley, Jin Sook Lee and Russell W. Rumberger and the authors of individual chapters. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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