Aria- Reflection

I read Richard Richardo piece on bilingual children, called "Aria". I really enjoyed reading this because I thought it was very insightful. I also thought that the title of the chapter was very appropriate for what Richardo was going to discuss in this particular chapter. An Aria is a very beautiful piece written for voice, that is usually written in Italian (where aria's originated). In this piece, Richardo talks about his personal struggles with speaking Spanish at home and having to  learn English. English is a very difficult language to learn even if you come from a home where it is spoken all the time, like me. I can not imagine knowing one language and having to learn English as well. One point I really liked that Richardo made was in one of the first paragraphs, where he talks about if he was taught  English later on in his schooling, how delayed he would be. He talks about if the teachers talked to him in Spanish he would probably have been more open to the teachers and his other classmates. I think that if teachers would take that approach to bilingual students it would make the students feel more open, however I think that students would want to keep speaking their language and not want to learn English. Many people in this country feel that people that emigrate from other countries should know how to speak English before they come here, and that English should  be made  the official language. I think that it should not be the official language because America has always been known as the melting pot because of the different types of people that has come to America since the start.
Another point that I really found interesting was when the nuns came to his house to tell his parents to help their children to speak English by speaking it at home more often. I think that that is the problem bilingual children have is that they can barley understand English, and when they get home they are speaking their native language to their parents because the parents only know the native language. Richardo says that after dinner, they would all practice their English and make it like a game. I don't know how many parents would sit down with their children and try to make them learn a language they themselves didn't know very well. When I took Spanish in high school, my parents had no clue what I was saying if I was speaking Spanish to them after dinner. Richardo calls English "the public language" because English is so common around the world that everyone speaks it. It is not necessarily a beautiful language like the romance languages. In the end of his chapter he talks about how his family was not very close when the children learned English. His father who did not know English was kind of pushed to the back and his mother became the head of the household because she knew English. His family lost a little of their closeness. If an Aria was translated from Italian to English, everyone would be able to understand what the vocalist was singing about, however it would loose it meaning. I think that even though English is a public language, other languages need to be spoken to maintain diversity here in America, but also all over the world.