English in America

For awhile, the past few years, I've been troubled by having to work with people whose abilities with the English language really suffered. I'm not talking just about the work-place, though I did have it there for awhile too since my former place of employment was the Foreign Service Institute in the School of Language Studies, working with teachers who had to be native speakers of the language they were teaching. Understandably, that was sometimes challenging, but I haven't been doing that for about a year now and haven't really had so much of an English problem in the work-place since. No, the greater problem has been working with poor English speakers in the "community"--on my personal business.

A few of those experiences include--
*the standard, trying to get tech support for my computer. I don't think my helper was living in the U.S. because his language was not standard U.S. English. That was extremely frustrating.

*trying to understand a pharmacy worker and have her understand me before signing any forms that involved my privacy rights.

*having a bus driver wiggle his head at me rather than speak to me because a person in a wheelchair was boarding the bus and he needed me to move. I hadn't seen the wheelchair and didn't understand what he was doing, so I looked at him quizzically, asked what the problem was, and he just continued to manually indicate to me that I needed to move. Finally another passenger let me know about the wheelchair.

The pharmacist was handled relatively easily--I never returned to that pharmacy. Though I'd already had the computer for a year and wasn't going to return it, I could at least take it to a local repair person. Thank goodness for competition. That's one thing of those great things about America.

But the bus incident was actually the scariest--to think the man driving the bus I was on didn't speak very good English. Could he understand his radio? Reports being given to him?

In some cases, it seems the English question is just a matter of a business's poor decisions about whom to hire for which positions. But the employment question actually takes another turn as well. I've applied for and studied job positions that I considered applying for and felt discriminated against because I didn't speak Spanish. This, for public service positions (in libraries) in the United States. Of course, the job descriptions couldn't say Spanish was required, just preferred. But as the number of people who don't speak English very well continues to increase, you can imagine how much that preference will influence the final hiring decision.

Recently, I learned of something that actually even minimized my hope of things even improving. That is, even if the borders are secured through hopeful legislation, there seems to be no promise that English-language capabilities will improve because, as I learned, the English-language tests for citizen applicants must be very weak.

A friend of mine reported after a day when she was in the jury pool that people had not only been allowed to be excluded but the judge forthrightly asked if their English language was good enough to understand the court proceedings. Why should the judge have any leeway to ask this question? If a person is born into US citizenship and grew up here, they would have gone through the education system and acquired sufficient English. If they became citizens by application, their English should have been tested to assure they could contribute to society including their natural duties as citizens--including jury duty. So apparently there's something wrong in one of these two areas.

Okay, so there is the other possibility that they be citizens born abroad and for whatever reason their citizen parent(s) didn't speak English with them, they didn't acquire it in school or whatever society, and then for whatever reason they just decided to move back to America without speaking a lick of English. Yes, I can see that there are some strong possibilities there.

Of course we know our education system has its problems, but it would seem that since a juror must be at least 18 years old, that at least by the very fact of living and growing up among English speakers the person would acquire sufficient English even if their teachers really stank. Children do tend to want to learn the language of the people around them. Are there really not enough English-speakers around to encourage these youth?

Without belaboring the point, it simply seems more likely the problem lies in the English testing of citizen applicants. So the question is why are the tests so lenient that a person doesn't need to communicate well enough to participate in his/her citizen's duties, such as performing jury duty? Is it because there are so many English speakers out there that we don't really need everyone to speak the only national language? Is it because this duty and honor is really only for natural born citizens? Or maybe jury duty isn't really that important. Our judicial system doesn't need any more lay citizens involved than it has to have already? It just seems to me that there is no good excuse at all for this.

We have enough trouble understanding each other even when we speak the same language that U.S. citizens shouldn't have to deal with additional language barriers when they're conducting personal business in their own country, trying to ensure their safety and rights. But most importantly, since the United States of America's only official language is English, her citizens need to speak this language with sufficient capability to perform all of their duties, which are in fact HONORS, as citizens.