Losing Our Language

by Stotsky, Sandra

• ISBN13: 9781893554481
• ISBN10: 1893554481
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-05-01
• Publisher: Encounter Books

Summary

Why do American students' reading and writing test scores continue to decline? Why does the achievement gap continue to grow between minority and other students? Poor teacher training, large class size, small budgets and other such answers have been proposed for these vexing questions. But Sandra Stotsky argues that it is the incorporation of a multicultural agenda into basal readers, the primary tool for teaching reading in elementary schools, that has stunted children's ability to read. Stotsky shows how basal readers have been systematically 'dumbed down' in an effort to raise minority students' 'self esteem'. While elementary readers of the past featured excerpts from classic stories such as 'Arabian Nights' and 'Robinson Crusoe', with a complex vocabulary and sentence structure able to challenge the imagination and build reading skills, today's basal readers present students with politically and ethnically correct stories whose language is virtually foreign and unable to engage students. Drawing words from Swahili, Spanish and other trendy dialects to teach students with a shrinking English vocabulary is a symptom of this intellectual and cultural disorder.

Author Biography

Sandra Stotsky is a research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
The Cultivation of Multicultural Illiteracy	1	(21)
How Social Goals Came to Dominate Academic Goals in the Reading Curriculum	22	(35)
The Cultural Contents of Contemporary Readers	57	(37)
The Corruption of Children's Literature and Literary Study	94	(31)
The New Moralism and Its Civic and Academic Costs	125	(25)
Spanglish, Swahili, and Dialect: Innovative Ways to Deprive Children of Literate English	150	(30)
How Did the Contents of Reading Series Change So Quickly?	180	(27)
The Effort to Downgrade and Degrade the English Language	207	(22)
Why There Is Little Research on the Effects of Multiculturalism on Academic Achievement	229	(11)
Is There a Future for Children's Literature and Literary Study?	240	(21)
Turning the Anti-Intellectual Tide	261	(24)
Notes	285	(26)
Index	311