Down On The Island - The Bilingual People

Down on the Island is a novel written by Jim Cooper about the academic behavior of puertorican students in Mayaguez in the 1950s. During the 1950’s a young professor went to visit and teach English class in the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. To his surprise he encountered the problem that students barely knew English language and in consequence the students would cheat on exams and homework. Even worse, the students would do this in front of him and with no shame at all. The students did not see this behavior as dishonest and unethical. It seemed it was an academical behavior supported and accepted in the school system of the island.

It is surprising the number of Americans who still believe puertoricans do not speak English. Indeed some older people never managed to even learn a healthy Spanish language, due to the late development of schools throughout the island in the before the 1950s. However this is not entirely true today. Many puertoricans, especially the younger population, are bilingual. Even the few that “do not know” English do in fact know but have never been able to practice it or have trouble in either writing or speaking but rarely is both.

I learned my English in middle school. It was the time I hit puberty and would listen to rock music all day long to brink of driving my mother crazy. My friends and I had one particular hobby which was watching music videos and American TV. We also enjoyed going to the movies and would challenge one another to not read the Spanish subtitles. This is the way many of the young bilingual population learned their English, and really good English. Combining the American media influences with the English courses we are required to take every year since kindergarten through college, we have been able to learn proper English and become a bilingual island.

Being a bilingual island has opened many doors for us as a country and as individuals. It makes tourists feel more comfortable because they can travel to the island without the constant worry of how they will communicate. It makes us more appealing to jobs and participation on entities because we able to communicate with a wider population than those who speak a single language. Moreover, we are easily able to learn a third language. Because both, English and Spanish is everywhere, it comes naturally to us without the need to study harder for it giving us a sense of two mastered languages. This in turn allow us to start learning a third language and making the process even easier. For example, English and French are alike languages, just like Spanish and Italian are also alike, still you will find Spanish words in the French and words similar to English on Italian. This is because Italian, Spanish and French are romance languages and English is derived from them. So, not only it is easier for us to learn a third language but it also broadens the spectrum of languages we are able to learn at a faster rate.

I wish Jim Cooper would visit the island at a present time. He would see that our English has improved and spread across the island, along with the unaccepted no-copy academic behavior.