Heritage courses for bilingual

His school performance was excellent , whenever English . But at home it was in Spanish , from its dilated talks with his grandparents in the evenings until Barbie magazines that came monthly. She was sure she was bilingual .

Until Dorothy , now a student at Harvard University , spent last summer studying in Mexico and realized how poor was his Spanish .

" We were talking about the presidential election and there were so many things I wanted to explain ," said Villarreal . "In the end we ended up playing a guessing game that I spoke English and my friends repeated it in Spanish , trying to guess what I meant ."

Villarreal 's experience is increasingly common in the United States, where one in five children growing up in a bilingual household . To help these young people to improve their language , several universities are expanding their language courses, in part to improve the preparation of students who will graduate and will need several languages ​​for their professional future in a world characterized by globalization.

For those who grow up in homes multilingual , there are certain advantages to it. They can greet and speak colloquially in another language, and even talk about light topics as time soap opera . But when it comes to deeper issues , or to read and write , they are in trouble.

The shortcomings are evident in high school, where these students are bored in basic language classes but are overwhelmed in the more advanced courses . And that is only if your school offers classes in cultural language , therefore the end of the day , how many schools in the U.S. offer courses in Arabic or Korean ?

With the growing U.S. Hispanic population , most language courses are in Spanish heritage , and these classes have proliferated California , Florida and several central-western states . Also some have emerged in institutions like Harvard University , which incorporated a course this year.

Villarreal , who aspires to work in Latin America for a multinational corporation or for the U.S. government - " without looking ridiculous ," he says - was among the first students to enroll in the course. He was excited about the opportunity to improve your Spanish without having to engage an advanced course with non-Latino peers , which may have strong accents but they pronounce the words correctly.

That kind of pressure , and shame because they can not read or write in a language that supposedly dominate , may lead some students to fall behind in the regular academic program , says Maria Luisa Parra Velasco , the Harvard professor who created the new Spanish course . Also , students may carry on stigma of speaking " broken Spanish " or more colloquial Spanish , says .

Apart from the language , the classes offer an unusual Villarreal academic space to talk about issues that can not talk comfortably with their white Anglo-Saxons. Compare your Spanish class with the class that has immediately afterwards: an advanced course in Spanish , focused on cultural practices in the border area between the U.S. and Mexico . In that class, Villareal speaks less .

" In class we talk about the border like an abstract concept, and for me , I went to school that was five minutes from the border. Border to me is what made suspend classes at my school because police helicopters are trying to catch people crossing , "he said .

Language programs of cultural heritage in the United States have existed in one form or another for over a century , as a way to preserve both the language and the culture, even amid movements demanding that only speak English. In the late nineteenth century , the German schools were common. In California, are tradition for years the Chinese and Japanese classes on weekends , and bilingual classes in English and Spanish have been established for years.

However, the emergence of language classes and cultural heritage is relatively new, especially in universities. The University of Texas -Pan American received funding from the Department of Education in 2007 to create a program of medical terms in Spanish , which is being replicated in other educational institutions.

Spanish classes are not the only ones that are fashionable . Harvard has developed programs in Russian, Chinese and Korean languages ​​that the U.S. government considers strategically important to the academic life and the world of espionage.

The National Heritage Languages ​​at the University of California at Los Angeles , funded by the Department of Education of the United States since 2006 , recently conducted the first national study of such courses , and found that they were teaching at 34 states and then the Spanish , the most popular were Chinese, Korean , Russian and Farsi .