1. One day in our Inquiry in Education class we were assigned to sit in a group and discuss the topic we were interested in basing our cultural inquiry upon. In the group I was part of there were four other women, and our topics were as different as we each were. They varied everywhere from immigration to education. During our discussion I expressed an interest in the topic relating to language and children. After further discussion this evolved into an idea that we were all very interested in. The purpose of our inquiry was to find out about our Spanish language was really being passed on future generations of Hispanic and Latino children. For this we interviewed Hispanic and Latino adults. Some of the problems we encountered were with our questionnaire. It was difficult to come up with questions that would reveal to us what we really wanted to find out. Another problem came with getting our subjects it wasn’t as easy as we had first thought, but eventually we got our work done. The biggest obstacle we faced was when we were done with our questionnaire, we had large amounts of information on each questionnaire and we had seventy-five of them. We eventually figured out how to divide our information so that it would be easier to be processed and recorded. We broke them into groups of adults born in the USA and those that were not; we also split each of those two groups into the level of education completed by the adults. We had decided that these two factors would greatly affect what language the children of the subjects would speak, and surely enough it did. For my part of the project I dealt with adults who were not born in the USA and who had college level education. There were thirty-one persons who fell under this category, an of those only 5 that were not parents. Being that those parents were not born in this country, all of them had learned Spanish as a first language. Although they had learned Spanish as a first language most of them spoke English and Spanish in their home but they only gained majority over those who only spoke Spanish by one. I had expected for there to be more parents who spoke both, due to their educational level. The charts you will see later on break down this information further. I fear that as we move on from generation to generation the emphasis on preserving our language isn’t as strong or as effective as it should be. Our language is such an essential part of our culture, isn’t language said to be a barrier, it sets us apart form other cultures. If we lose language how long will it be then until we assimilate so much into American culture that we loose our own. This is something that I will try to fight by at least keeping our culture and language alive in my family. By Wandy Click on your browser’s back button to return to our homepage