Thanks for the submission. This is an interesting article about applied linguistics for primary education in the United States. Approximately around 1900, the United States reached its peak period of receiving immigrants who were not English-speaking when they arrived. Today, nearly all Americans speak one variety or another of English, even though only about one-fourth of the United States population consists of persons whose ancestors spoke English before arrival in the United States. English has been assimilated by almost all inhabitants of the United States precisely because it is the only language that unites all those inhabitants. (Three of my four grandparents, all of whom were born in the United States, spoke a language at home other than English. My two maternal grandparents received the entirety of their schooling in church-operated schools in the German language, one in Nebraska and one in Colorado. But they spoke English just fine as adults, and that was the language I communicated with them in both by direct conversation and by postal letters. My Norwegian-speaking paternal grandmother went to college, majoring in English, and relied on her knowledge of another Germanic language to help her progress in reading Beowulf in the original Old English. I still have her college edition of Beowulf at home.)
The worry in the United States today is about the primary education of young people who grow up in cohesive communities of speakers of varieties of English that differ from broadcast standard General American English. The cases of African-American speakers and Hawaiian speakers of dialectal English are both mentioned in the article. To me, as someone who studied linguistics in my university studies, it seems a "no brainer" to meet elementary school pupils on common ground and to make sure their teachers understand the home language background of the pupils as the pupils are taught standard English in school. (Everyone appears to be united in the cause of making sure school pupils learn the standard national language, with the only serious dispute being about means.) There are, alas, social disadvantages in the United States from having nonstandard speech patterns
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5123171
even if those speech patterns are well accepted in some social subgroups here. Just as my grandparents were free to use German or Norwegian to communicate throughout their long lifetimes, let today's children speak however they like in their private lives, but let's meanwhile provide all learners the opportunity to learn the speech patterns that are most expedient to adopt here.
