Immigrant parents struggle to keep their children bilingual - The Boston Globe: ... According to research presented to Congress in May, even the children of immigrants prefer to speak English by the time they are adults. Rub�n G. Rumbaut, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine, and his team of researchers looked at 5,700 adults in their 20s and 30s in Southern California from different generations to see how long their language survived. A key finding centered on 1,900 American-born children of immigrants. The shift toward English among them was swift: While 87 percent grew up speaking another language at home, only 34 percent said they spoke it well by adulthood. And nearly 70 percent said they preferred to speak English. 'English wins, and it does so in short order,' said Rumbaut, who presented his findings to the US House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration in May. 'What we're talking about is a real phenomenon.' It is difficult for children to sustain their parents' languages amid the tidal wave of American pop culture, including movies and television, coupled with societal pressure to speak only English. Most schools and communities do little to preserve bilingualism, Rumbaut said. Even bilingual education programs, which Massachusetts voters dismantled in 2002, were commonly designed to help students make the transition to English-only classrooms.
