What if we talked about monolingual White children the way we talk about low-income children of color?

I have tried to articulate the problem of monolingualism, even offering a “cure” for monolingualism. Regardless of the satire of this piece, this rings 100% true, “This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the cognitive development of monolingual White children.”

Why would the linguistic mainstream deprive their children of what is proven to offer a cognitive advantage, teaching them another language?

The Educational Linguist

I have written a previous post debunking the so-called language-gap.  In this post I flip the script and imagine a world where interventions have been developed for monolingual White children using the same language gap discourse.

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It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the richness of non-standardized varieties of English that characterize the homes of many children of color. This language gap increases the longer these children are in school. The question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to address it?

The major cause of this language gap is the failure of monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued existence of White…

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