English catching on with many foreign students
By LAUREN BONIFACIO Special to the Daily Press BY LAUREN BONIFACIO Special to the Daily Press
“What do you call a person who speaks two languages?” the joke goes.
“Bilingual.”
“What do you call a person who speaks one language?”
“American.”
It’s a tongue-in-cheek jab at the perceived English-centrism of those living in the United States, even while students in many other foreign countries learn two languages, at least.
But in Santa Monica and Malibu, some school officials want to change that image.
The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Board voted March 25 to establish a task force that would explore the possibility of teaching Spanish to students district-wide, starting with sixth graders.
“You can’t live … in Los Angeles … without being proficient in Spanish,” said schools superintendent John Deasy, whose two daughters speak fluent Spanish. “It’s just so pertinent to our world.”
Acquiring Spanish proficiency would help students in their day-to-day lives and in the future, Deasy said.
“We want kids to be successful,” Deasy said. “We want them to have the edge.”
While still in the “beginning stages” of its work, the task force will evaluate the different options for a Spanish proficiency plan and address possible roadblocks to it, such as finding funding and adequately trained teachers, said district chief academic officer Linda Kaminsky, who will oversee the group.
555,“Those are the kinds of questions that we would be wrestling with,” Kaminsky said.
The task force is expected to present its findings to the school board in January. If support from the school board continues, the Spanish classes could start in the 2005-06 school year.
“I think it’s going to pass,” said school board member Oscar de la Torre, one of three board members fluent in Spanish. “I think people in the school district want this.”
Of about 12,000 students in the school district, 27 percent are Hispanic and 58 percent are white.
Regardless of the white majority, school officials say parents in the district know that Spanish is an advantage.
“Parents are begging for it,” Deasy said.
Mothers waiting outside John Adams Middle School in Santa Monica last week agreed that being bilingual is important.
“I think definitely, they should all learn more languages here,” said Karen Goldman, whose sixth-and seventh-grade daughters voluntarily take Spanish classes at the school.
Learning Spanish “just opens up their minds,” said Isabel Alegre. After recently moving to Marina del Rey, Alegre and her sixth grader, Samantha, chose John Adams specifically because the school offers a Spanish immersion program.
Local students can take some of their classes in English and some in Spanish at Edison Elementary School, John Adams or Santa Monica High School.
40B,“I don’t know why, especially in LA, there were no other middle schools that offered it … parochial, public or private,” Alegre said.
School data shows that students in the immersion program earned better grades than their uni-lingual peers across the board, Alegre said.
“It’s cool because it seems better that I know two languages,” said 11-year-old Samantha Alegre, who speaks Spanish fluently. Sometimes Samantha serves as her mother’s translator at the grocery store.
But some parents said they would not support a district immersion program.
“I don’t like it,” said Leticia Lua, who pulled her 12th grader, a native Spanish speaker, out of the immersion program when he was at Edison. Lua’s sixth-grade daughter is not in the immersion program at John Adams.
After speaking Spanish with her children at home, Lua said she wanted them to learn and practice English when they were at school. Since Lua’s son did not have as much time to practice English, he started having problems in his English math classes at Edison, Lua said.
Educators should be careful to address situations like Lua’s when creating a Spanish program, said Michael Genzuk, a University of Southern California professor of education and former adviser to the LA Unified School District Office of Bilingual-ESL Instruction.
“The benefits depend a lot on the proficiency of your first language,” Genzuk said. “Research shows that proficiency in the first language really expedites second language acquisition.”
Students need to reach age-appropriate levels in their first language and learn how to listen to and comprehend their second language before being rushed into new programs, Genzuk said.
However, gauging the requirements for the program would be difficult without the task force’s results. It appears school officials have not come to an overall consensus about what “Spanish proficiency” means.
Deasy said students would be required to obtain a level of proficiency that would allow them to do basic writing, reading and speaking.
“It doesn’t mean you can read Cervantes,” Deasy said.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 9, 2004. Read the original PDF.