Harry,
Have you heard of Woodbridge and Maple, in
Ontario? 80 per cent of my neighbours are of Italian
background. The average home, in our neighborhood, is priced at
about $300 000.00, with many tipping 500 000.00. These numbers are
above the Canadian means. Some ghetto!
As to the failure of ESL [I work with Korean
ESL students, periodically], I can't agree. There are problems in the
delivery of programme, but these are largely problems with underfunding and
lack of availability in many schools, or underqualified teachers, in some
instances.
Public education has not served this population
well, despite the encouragement to immigrate to Canada, a country whose
public programmes are being maintained by immigrant tax dollars given
that the Canadian birth rate is dropping.
As a point of interest, the research shows that
it takes, on average, 7 years for an ESL learner to attain mastery in
English. Before using the word "failure", I would like to know where
in that process the program evaluation leading to your conclusion of
'failure' has been done?
The failures I see are failures of public will,
especially in the past 8 years in Ontario.
The situation, in the US, is quite different,
of course, given the archaic, class-determined manner in which education
revenues are raised, based on local property values, and this impacts
directly on the quality of programme delivery.
Bob
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2003 1:58
PM
Subject: RE: [Futurework] 128.
Anti-immigration feeling grows in Europe
Harry,
why do you say that ESL has been a complete failure? -
KWC
Ed,
When
I lived in Ontario, it was noticeable that new immigrants tended to move
into their own "ghettos". Particularly so in the case of the Italians, who
gathered together in Toronto.
There
is nothing wrong with this, for it is natural for people in new and
strange circumstances to cleave to their own, but I wonder what the
situation is now?
Are
the sons and daughters of the immigrants moving out into the broader
reaches of Canada? We have a problem here with new immigrants (legal and
illegal) from Mexico. I should say that they have a problem. The only way
they have of getting out of the barrios is by learning English. The
schools are letting them down.
Teachers
who teach the ESL. classes (English as a Second Language)
earn an extra $5,000 a year for doing so. Yet, the program appears to have been a complete
failure.
I
want the sons and daughters to get out of the barrios and become CEOs,
perhaps of Enron and similar companies, but in any event, good English is
the passport to success.
Fortunately,
the kids learn English themselves. Unfortunately, not the kind of
English that would become a passport.
Harry
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