Introduction

If we tried to get to the core of why a child would speak more than their native language, we would find that there are two main reasons. The first reason is that the family of the child has the ability to facilitate their child’s language learning opportunities – this generally indicates that the family is financially secure and is able to provide resources like language books, tutors, programs, and lessons. On the other hand, the alternative explanation for a child’s ability to speak a non-native language comes out of necessity rather than luxury. This necessity to adopt a non-native language usually arises when the child is subjected to environments where they have no choice but to learn a second language to fit in, especially in educational setting like schools and afterschool clubs, and social settings like parks and public transportation. This is generally the case for most 1.5^th-generation immigrants in the United States, and it is especially prevalent in Texas, where many Hispanic immigrants settle down.

The children of these immigrants are subjected to schools where they are necessitated to adopt the English language, despite speaking only Spanish at home. For these children, learning a new language is a necessity, not a luxury. Many of these children live in low-income areas and attend schools with low rates of federal funding; their parents work paycheck to paycheck and face limitations on their abilities to move up the social and professional ladder. An unfortunate circumstance of children who attend lower-funded schools is that they are less likely to be studied by major researchers, which makes it more difficult to collect data on their abilities to perform better on academic assessments. The prevailing consequence of this is that is becomes much harder to compare the academic performance of children who learn a new language out of luxury to the academic performance of children who learn a new language out of necessity. Making the distinction between luxury learning and necessity learning is paramount to our understanding of the relationship between languages and academic performance and is the biggest missing factor from the current collection of academic literature which measures the relationship between bilingualism and academic success.