Teaching is a highly social and contextualized process. That is, it is most effective when contextual factors such as prior experiences, community settings, cultural backgrounds, and the ethnic identities of teachers and students are overtly included in teaching and learning. However, overt attention to these factors is often ignored in schools with Latino, Native American, African American, and Asian American students, especially if they are poor. Instead, these students often are taught from the middle-class, Eurocentric perspectives that shape school practices. Bilingual education is a mess. It looks good on paper. After all, knowing more than one language is a tremendous asset in our society. But the program often falls apart in the implementation because educators tend to put the interests of adults ahead of those of children.

It appears that children’s native language plays a role in determining some of the kinds of errors they’re likely to make in learning English. In large school districts where there are language groups of significant size, wouldn’t it make sense to place children in classes according to their native language so that teachers can work on the specific problems encountered by each group? While there might be some slight, temporary benefit to grouping children according to native language, there may be more disadvantages than advantages in this for both children and teachers. In the first place, interference from the native language is only one of the reasons children make errors.