Bilingualism is defined as people who use two languages in the course of their every day life are not identical to those people who use only one language to communicate. For bilingual individuals their two languages form a unitary whole (Valdes, 6). What that means is that anyone who can effectively communicate in two different languages is bilingual. What's added to the definition is an aspect that creates a separation between a mere familiarity with two languages and full communicative skills in two languages. That is important because there are two kinds of bilingual people: elective bilinguals and circumstantial bilinguals. Elective bilinguals are those who choose to become bilingual by taking classes to learn a foreign language (Valdes, 12). Those are people who took

Bilingual education is a dual-language program designed to provide equal educational opportunities to students of limited English proficiency in their own native language. The U.S. has a large number of students, especially in elementary school, whose home language is not English. Because of the existence of these, the bilingual education program was created to ensure that these students:

· Learn the basic subjects (reading, arithmetic, science, social studies, etc.) in their home language from the time they enter school. This has the advantage of promoting their academic progress, during the period they are learning the English language,

· Begin learning English from the time they enter school. The process begins with the development of oral English and, later, with the development of English literacy skills. Thus, the learning of the English language is one of the primary goals of bilingual education,

A big problem with bilingual education is that prominent people like Richard Rodriguez are against it when they should be for it. Proposition 227, the "English for the Children" initiative, set a bad mark on bilingualism advocates. What it did, or will eventually do, is remove all English as a Second Language (ESL) programs and replace them with an "English immersion" program. This is just horrible. There is no proven data on its effectiveness, in fact there is data proving its ineffectiveness. A 1991 report by Dr. James Cummins Ontario Institute for Studies on Education and Dr. Michael Gensuk of USC "refuted the notion that intensive exposure to English is the best way of teaching language to minority children," (Cummins). Their study compared English imm

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1132
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)