According to the journal “Loss of Family Languages: Should Educators Be Concerned,” an estimated 3.5 million children in U.S. schools have limited English proficiency. This limits their access to the different academic and life activities offered in schools. This leads to an urgent need for families to encourage their children to learn English so that they can better enroll in a normal school life and be able to perform better in school in terms of grades. However, this urgency can be seen less as a problem of learning English than as a loss of the primary language. As these children learn English as a second language, they increase their chances of losing their primary native language (Fillmore, 1). As they learn their new language, they become better enrolled in the American way of life and the use of English dominates over their native language, and this is basically what marks the loss of the language. It has been seen that the first and second generations are able to maintain bilingualism. However, language loss has been observed to occur between the second and third generations, mainly because the second generation rarely uses their native language (Fishman and Hofman. 1966. Portes and Rumbault, 1990). That said, this shows and highlights the huge indirect effect that families' immigration has on their native languages and their loss and the need for families to better understand the value of a
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