| Spanish-speaking parents choose to enroll their children in either an English only or English-Spanish dual immersion program when presented with both choices. This ethnographic study explored parent's perceptions of the purpose, advantages, and disadvantages of learning in school in English only or in a dual English-Spanish. Through focus group and individual interviews with seven Spanish speaking parents living in southern California who had children enrolled in a school that offered the academic program taught in English only or in a dual immersion English Spanish program, the research explored the participant's experiences with English, their feeling about English and Spanish, their ideas on how important each language is, their reasoning behind their choice of language in academic influence, and their perception of their child's language preference as well as their reactions. After multiple readings of the transcripts major findings are: • participants' perception of language as a key to access groups and power structures, • the underlying dilemma of how language reveals the tension between acculturation and language preservation, • parents' perception of attitudes towards different languages • contradictions between parents' expressed attitudes and their language behavior • the assumptions parents make reasoning that English must be mastered and Spanish will be learned organically, • the advantages of schooled bilingualism versus organic bilingualism, • the awareness parents have of their native language and how it is transforming (pochismos) • the dominance of English pushing the shift from Spanish to English and increasing language loss. |
