Hispanics cause shortage of ESL teachers

In the highly charged debate over immigration, one of the common refrains is that someone is going to come live in this country, they should learn English.

Strictly speaking, I agree with this sentiment.

When I lived in two French-speaking countries, I knew some French before I got there but was constantly trying to figure out how to speak and write it better. It would be awful presumptuous of me to move to Costa Rica or Austria or Japan and not bother to learn how to speak Spanish, German or Japanese and just expect them to speak English. I don't feel comfortable even being a temporary tourist in a country where I don't speak the language at all.

I think when you're in another culture, you ought to respect the prevailing norms of that culture as much as possible, including language. Many Americans don't do this when they travel abroad, which is how the 'ugly American' stereotype has become so prevalent. But it's something we should do when we're abroad and something others should do while they're here. It's simply a question of courtesy and respect.

Diversity's extremely important and I'd never argue that immigrants should give up their mother tongue. My grandparents and great-grandparents certainly never stopped speaking Italian at home or other family gatherings. Quite the opposite, I think more Americans should learn foreign languages. But especially in a diverse country like ours, there needs to be a few common reference points.

Nevertheless, what bothers me about the common refrain I talked about above is that it's premised on the assumption that most immigrants are lazy and have no desire to learn English.

I know many immigrants, predominantly colleagues from Latin America. And while some speak English better than others, they all speak some and the ones that don't speak it that well want to get better at it. I have no reason to think my acquaintances are unique.

Since most Americans are unfortunately unilingual, they have no clue about the process of learning a foreign language, especially as an adult. You can't just snap your fingers. listen to a few cassette tapes and become fluent in a language. It takes time. A lot of time. It takes time when you're doing nothing but studying that language. It takes longer when you can only study the language interimittently because you're laboring for 12 hours a day milking cows..

(Incidentally, if you call someone a leech when they're busting their butt as a dairy farm laborer, you have absolutely no clue hard this job is)

So I was interested to listen to this story from North Country Public Radio which talked about the desperate shortage of English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers.

The skyrocketing demand for ESL programs in the North Country is particularly noteworthy given the significant increase in recent years of Latin Americans working on the dairy farms of northern New York.

Maybe the Hispanic immigrants to this country are little less lazy than popular stereotypes give them credit for.