Bilingual Education, Oil, and the Navajo Nation Research Paper

Bilingual Education, Oil, and the Navajo Nation - Research Paper Example Bilingual education is a form of education where information is presented to learners in two or more distinct languages. In the United States, though English has not been endorsed as the official national language, most schools if not all in the U.S.A use English in the teaching of schools not considering that America is also comprised of other various native languages that may get extinct as a result of only using English in teaching in schools (Romaine, 1995). Discussion The state of Arizona has in the resent past been the subject of discussion in matters relating to bilingualism in education since it is majorly populated by the people of the Navajo nation who have and would like to use their language in the education of their children. The people of Navajo who speak Athabaskan have been objecting the education of their children in English since this has saw the steady decline in the number of people who speak Athabaskan. The state of Arizona has since developed a proposition 203, which is an initiative that illegalizes the use of native language in instruction of learners who have a limited a proficiency in English in public schools. The proposition has also made sure that the new law is implemented to the latter by micromanagement of schools using the electoral process to implement the English only policy in public schools (Favela, 2008). In the recent discovery of oil in the territory that had been assigned to the Navajo, they might as well scrap this law off since they only demand for bilingual instruction in the education of public schools surrounding their nation. U.S.A has no territorial rights in the Navajo territory as this area is private property and belongs entirely to the nation of Navajo. The scraping off of this newly implemented law is likely due to the fact that the nation of U.S.A is really in great need of locating more energy resources within its borders; the prospect of a major onshore oil field in Arizona is very significant. As your leg al adviser, I have devised several policies that you would choose if you see fit to present to the council of the Navajo representatives to assess whether they would be swayed to consider their hard-line stand in regard to the reintroduction of bilingua