Laura’s Reviews > Tongue-Tied: The Lives of Multilingual Children in Public Education > Status Update

Everytime I find myself thinking, speaking ,writing and breathing in two languages though, I disagree with everyone who thinks that speaking both simultaneously is a disgrace.

For too many years I have seen the cycle of poverty of our people. All my life I have seen more wasted minds and lives than Allen Ginsberg ever dreamed of seeing. -Benjamin Alire Saenz, I Want to Write an American Poem III

Each language makes the other relative...When I learn to say those smallest, first things in the language that has served for detachment and irony and abstraction, I begin to see where the languages I've spoken have their correspondences—how I can move between them without being split by the difference. -Eva Hoffman

I'm sad, too. For the English language robbed of the beat your home talk could give it...robbing the young one...of a fine brew of language, a stew of words and ways that could inspire her to self-loving invention...of the smell of the kitchen on the page. -Rosario Morales, I Recognize You

To be close to another Chicana is like looking into the mirror. We are afraid of what we'll see there. Pena. Shame. Low estimation of self. In childhood we are told that our language is wrong. Repeated attacks on our native tongue...Often with Mexicans y Latinas we'll speak English as a neutral language...So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. -Gloria Anzaldua

English is an all-devouring language that has moved across North America like the fabulous plagues of locusts that darkened the sky and devoured even the handles of rakes and hoes. Yet the omnivorous nature of a colonial language is a writer’s gift. Raised in the English language, I partake of a mongrel feast. —Louis Erdrich, Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart

Nandookomeshiinh, the lice hunter, is the monkey...Aiibiishaabookewininiwag, the tea people, are Asians. Agongosininiwag, the chipmunk people, are Scandinavians...There is a word for what would happen if a man fell off a motorcycle with a pipe in his mouth and the stem of it went through the back of his head. The word for stone, asin, is animate...It is a language that also recognizes the humanity of a creaturely God

Naawi-giizis introduced me to the deep intelligence of the language and forever set me on a quest to speak it for one reason: I want to get the jokes...spiked with puns on both English and Ojibwe, most playing on the oddness of gichi-mookomaan that is, big knife, or American, habits and behavior...I can talk to God only in this language, that somehow my grandfather's use of the language penetrated. -Louise Erdrich

I suggest that we may learn from spaces of silence as well as spaces of speech, that in the patient act of listening to another tongue we may subvert that culture of capitalist frenzy and consumption that demands all desire must be satisfied immediately, or we may disrupt that cultural imperialism that suggests one is worthy of being heard only if one speaks in standard English.

to correct the student's Ebonics-influenced pronunciations and grammar while ignoring that fact that the student had to have comprehended the sentence in order to translate it into her own language...blocks reading development...She is encouraged to think of reading not as something you do to get a message, but something you pronounce