ALA Report on Non-English Speakers
Posted by Chris on March 27th, 2008 filed in language, libraries, politicsFrom the report’s executive summary,
About 21 million people in the United States speak limited or no English, 50 percent more than a decade ago. This impacts public agencies in health care and education the most but impacts other public agencies, as well. Library staff is faced daily with someone who needs services, and does not speak English.
This is an issue that’s really dear to my heart, mostly because the population that my particular library branch serves often has very limited English language proficiency (a lot of Spanish-speakers, but also a great deal of Korean- and Vietnamese-speakers as well).
The findings of this report hit me especially hard, because I was at the Department of Health a week ago and realized that they were fully equipped to interact with customers whose primary language was not English: practically all the signage was printed in both English and Spanish, and staff were beyond adequately prepared to interact with customers in the language with which they (the customers) were most comfortable.
This report is beyond important, especially for those libraries in metropolitan areas with burgeoning immigrant populations. It’s even more coincidental that, the same day that I was the Department of Health, I was able to interact with a library customer who, at first seemed to have a purely technical problem (he was trying to upload some forms from a website to a floppy disk), but it turned out he was really facing a linguistic barrier. Once I said, “Cual forma necessita?” he responded with “Tu hablas espanol?” Not to get his hopes up, I assured him that I only spoke a little, but I was able to help him find the forms he needed and then showed him how to transfer them to a floppy disk. He apologized for his limited skills with the English language. I assured him that there was no reason to apologize.
This is seriously required reading for any librarian who works with a linguistically diverse population.
Discovered via Steven.
March 30th, 2008 at 7:15 am
I could probably write a book on this, being an ESOL teacher who is in the process of becoming a school librarian.
Good read. I guess since I spend most of my time in a situation where I’m surrounded by students who speak Spanish (and a very small handful speak Vietnamese), it doesn’t seem like huge news that more and more people won’t be speaking English in the near future. The librarian-to-be in me is all for making sure that resources are available to these patrons in their language, and that the library experience is
But… the ESOL teacher in me doesn’t want non-English speakers to continuously rely on services/materials to always be available in their native language. I know it’s a great thing to strive for, and probably is already in place in some areas. It is not the norm, however, in all areas, and in the event that a family were to move from Atlanta to say, small-town Arkansas, where non-English resources might not be as plentiful, they won’t have that safety net there.
I think there is a fine line between wanting to assist others the best we can, and at the same time, possibly building a very fragile sense of security that might not be transferable to all situations.
Ok, back to my never-ending research and writing!
March 30th, 2008 at 9:16 am
The United States has the privilege of not having to learn another language because of its geographical isolation from other countries (unlike European countries, for example), and as the richest nation in the world, we’re used to having citizens of other countries and immigrants to the US learn English. But as jobs are outsourced and as the population of the US changes, we’ll have to give up that sense of entitlement to function economically. Also, we’re all ultimately “immigrants” except for Native Americans. If people don’t like how immigrants are affecting the country, then we all need to go to our countries of origin and let the Native Americans live in the US alone, again.