National Language Act of 2009

[tcollura]

Recently I have been doing a project on the National Language Act of 2009. Although some may think that this act is against bilingual education, I think that by implementing English as the national language of the federal government it will force our schools into making concrete structures for it's ESL programs. I think this bill will spur on the students and adults in the communitties to learn English faster and can only bring positive results on our immigrant population.

[staciholland]

According to the Government Accountability Office in the years of 95-97 only 200 non-English language documents were printed from a government printing office and of that number the majority were for social services agencies and the social security administration office. tThere is no direct correlation between language and American unity and the elimination of the documents that the federal government provides to non-native speakers is minimal compared to the number of English documents printed each year. The fact is that 99.9% of all government documents are already in English so the need to pass a law for something that is already in place is unnecessary an opens the federal government to a barrage of frivolous lawsuits.

[lmojica]

I just read an article about the great need of bilingual citizen to fulfill Government and myriad job. These jobs are essential our counties well being and safety. Although the government supports National Language Act of 2009, it’s really those not help our nation need of bilinguage citizen to full these jobs. In the future, Dual Language Education will prepare our citizen to execute theses jobs.

[KRizzo]

Although there are arguments for both sides - I agree with tcollura. "The City of San Francisco must spend $350,000 for each language that a document is translated into under the city's bilingual government ordinance. "(Source: Janet Ng, Asian Week.com, June 2001)
It would be ridiculous for us not to think that it would cost an exorbitant amount of money to create documents supporting all languages spoken in the US - which is approximately 322.

[tcollura]

I do agree that if most documents are printed in English it's not worth the lawsuit risk. At the same time I guess I was thinking about the cultral effects of this bill as well. I just think that it will provide extra motivation for non native speakers not in school to learn English. This also would create an increase in jobs for adult ESL teachers.