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English Language and Hispanic Community

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Submitted By skerdi1
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English Language in the Hispanic Communites

I came to United States at age of 17, to participate in an exchange student high school program. Upon my arrival my English language knowledge was poor and limited. I encountered many difficult experiences at the high school and at the family I lived with. From the very beginning I was determined to improve my English language skills and by the end of the semester I believed I had made a huge improvement. I personally am aware of the difficulties there are to learn a new language but living in the Las Cruces area for almost five years has made me face a very interesting phenomenon, that is of a large number of Hispanic population seems to not know English. As I have asked around, I have found out that a lot of these people have been living in United States for a long period of time. This phenomenon got me wondering why that these people do not learn the official language of the country they live in, which is closely connected to the integration of this community into the American life. Out of so many stores and offices I have visited I could say that in almost all of them you can find employees that could assist you in the Spanish language, even taken to the extreme in some stores the cashiers can only speak Spanish. I feel that this clearly demotivates the locals to learn English when they can find ways to communicate. Learning the language of the country you live in is closely connected to prosperity in working and living conditions. There is much less jobs offered to persons that are not able to speak English, directly affecting the socio-economic status of this community. There is no federal program to help elder people learn English, even the free courses offered by different universities have really low attendance.
Regions were Hispanics tend to not learn English are usually the states in the border with Mexico,

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