The achievement gap of Mexican Americans in the US has been attributed to a variety of factors, among them language, learning styles, and socio-economic status. In this paper, after looking at the question of linguistic allegiance and the debate which arose in the area of bilingual education between the government which favoured transition to English and those who preferred language maintenance programmes, the role of the schools and the question of learning styles will be discussed. It will be seen that the achievement gap of Mexican Americans and other groups in the US is essentially a question of economics and that the solution lies in greater access to the wider society.
In the lived-in practice of one's first language and culture, mastery within one's social niche is the expectation and, barring disabilities, the result. Contact with a second language and culture leads to the possibility of individual choice within a social context of greater or lesser constraints. Personal goals, political and economic relations, and sociocultural circumstances will largely determine the outcome of contact and the language strategies available. In the negotiation of contact, the outcome may be mastery of the grammatical structure alone, varying degrees of communicative ability, integration into the new group, or the ability to use the language as a means of making a social statement, whether as a sign of association with another group or as an attempt to garner prestige within or dissociate themselves from the reigning social order of their own community. Here we suggest how the outcome of language and culture contact can be predicted only once an understanding of the context has been achieved.
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