Thursday, October 24, 2019

English: Official Language Essay

â€Å"If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything. † — Confucius All of us are created individually because we have our differences to one another. We must obtain the fact that we are not made to use same knowledge in one aspect of context. Based on our personal perspectives, we have our own ideologies and culture that we need to preserve for it was the source of our identity. Language is one of our cultural differences to one another. By way of taking our mother tongue just to obtain new knowledge of English language was not a fair solution to globalization. That is why we must have our own guts to differ the policy stating that English language should the only language spoken and written in the world. From the time of language policy conception until today, the debate between whether to use English as the only language or not continued to more sensitive issues and arguments. Many organizations and individuals who are against with this concept are making their own way to inform the public about the limitations of the policy. Despite of promulgating this policy to many schools and companies, many people are still undecided to take this action because it was not a reasonable thinking. According to Leonard Kniffel in his article, â€Å"English only is English Lonely†, â€Å"we understood in those days that English was the key to success and acceptance. Kids like us embraced into exclusion of any language or custom that made as back as if we were just off the boat† (3). The main targets of the institutions behind the promulgation of English language policy are the children for they could not render opposition to what the academe or the social law would impose to them. Children could be feed any information without asking why and how things happened. Therefore, by using children as the primary way to make English as the official language, success will come into a wide variety of situation. According to Rebecca Weber in her article â€Å"Something to Talk About†, â€Å"English-only advocates say that assimilation and mastering English are crucial to success in school, the workforce, and society. But children who can speak English on playground can’t necessarily comprehend grade-level academic content in English† (25). This statement shows that by feeding a child the orientation to speak English language is a terrible problem because even if in his or her daily activities should make him or her use the Standard English language. Therefore, problem may arise within this issue because limitation of a child’s activity because of English language will be done without any good reasoning or justification. On the other way around, according to Loreta Medina in her article entitled â€Å"English Immersion has not been proven to Raise Test Scores†, Contrary to popular wisdom, systematic evaluations show bilingual education to be superior to English-only approaches on promoting English reading. But that advantage is fairly small if it is not combined with other costly efforts to improve the school leadership and instructional approaches that go far beyond the tired refrain of the language of instruction. (2) This statement shows that English is not the solution to global problem because there are more things to discuss rather than limiting people to use only one language. By promoting this policy, people will be engaged to a dictatorial situation wherein they could not use their mother tongue, which they could more express their selves rather than using English language. As a whole, policy on using English language as the only language used in the world especially in the society of America should not be promulgated because it promotes discrimination and inequality especially to different immigrants who could not obtain English language very well. English language will always be the second language of many immigrants from other countries but it should not be the reason to deploy them because we must know that they are striving hard to learn the language even if it was already in the sense of stupidity.

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