Aria 6/9/09

Quote #1: “Because I wrongly imagined that English was intrinsically a public language and Spanish an intrinsically private one, I easily noted the difference between classroom language and the language of my home.”

Aria is describing what I see in my students who compartmentalize their birth language and their adopted language, trying to learn English in the classroom while they maintain their first language in their homes and cultural community. In the beginning of language acquisition, this silent period is the adjustment phase where students ease into the change they must inevitably embrace to be successful in America. As Aria describes his public and private language, he reveals his impending loss of the safety and security of home and culture embodied by his birth language.

Quote #2: “Matching the silence I started hearing in public was a new quiet at home. The family's quiet was partly due to the fact that, as we children learned more and more English, we shared fewer and fewer words with our parents.”

This is the saddest part of American assimilation, an all too familiar story for immigrants, albeit, an inherent factor for most. As many students become more fluent in their second language, their public language, they slowly lose the connection to their families which was nurtured through their common cultural language. Arias is reminding us of how hard it is to maintain allegiance to both languages, begging the question, “Is there any way to keep both languages viable?”

Question#3: “I would have been happier about my public success had I not sometimes recalled what it had been like earlier, when my family had conveyed its intimacy through a set of conveniently private sounds. "

This is a poignant moment in the assimilation of an immigrant into a new country. With melancholy, Aria expresses his loss of intimacy with his first language, the language he shared in the safety and comfort of his home with his family. This was the first language he heard spoken as a baby, the first language that nurtured him and helped to create his identity. However, growth means letting go of ones old identity to build a new identity. In his closing lines, Aria rebuffs the philosophy of bilingualists who say that English language learners lose their identity in the melting pot of America. Instead he believes that although English language learners lose some of their “private individuality”, by acquiring the public language, he/she earns a “public individuality”, which just happens to be the goal of a democratic education.