Out in Las Vegas, casino owners aren't messing around with trendy English instruction like bilingual education, and they aren't at the mercy of school boards who demand "politically-correct" methods. They just want to teach their immigrant workers English in the fastest way possible - immersion - and they've been quite successful at it:
While battles continue to rage in states like Oregon, Texas, Colorado, Illinois and New York, where some language education "experts" still cling to an outmoded construction known as bilingual education, Las Vegas hotel-casinos teach English the way new Americans have been learning it for generations: immersion, sink or swim.
Las Vegas has been quietly succeeding where public schools subscribing to the bilingual model have failed — and it has done so simply by not tampering with an individual's natural predisposition to grasp a new language faster when it is the only tool available...
Like the transitional bilingual ed programs at public schools, where kids are taught all subjects in their native tongue and ESL is just a one-hour period like any other, MGM/Mirage's Bellagio also offers ESL courses to employees. But here is the key to the casino's success, which somewhere along the line got lost on the politically correct forces behind the bilingual industry: The job skills themselves are taught in English — and not in Spanish, Chinese, Ethiopian, French, Russian and everything in between...
Granted, the standards for proficiency may not be quite the same between casino-run ESL programs and those at public schools, but at least the illiteracy rate among the willing isn't increasing at this non-educational facility the way it did for years among the Spanish-speaking bilingual ed school children of California, where teachers would heap praise on third-graders when they managed merely to recite the alphabet.
...A middle-aged Bellagio guest room attendant who wouldn't even pick up a ringing telephone for fear that the caller might speak English became confident enough to pick up the phone by the end of her four-month English course at the casino. Another employee, whose English skills needed some honing through the program for her job as a bus person, a few weeks ago interviewed to become assistant manager at the hotel's buffet restaurant.
Interesting.
Posted by kswygert at August 26, 2003 10:10 AM