SAN DIEGO, Jan. 3—On the classroom wall a mural depicts Aztecs worshiping the sun. Children spin a Spanish-language globe and teachers rattle off numbers in Spanish.

None of the pupils are from Spanish-speaking families. They are enrolled in the largest publicly financed program in the country in which pupils are immersed in the environment of a foreign language, according to experts in the field, and it is one of a handful of such programs to be used as a tool to integrate schools.

The program is at Longfellow Elementary School, in a predominantly white, affluent neighborhood in San Diego. All the pupils are bused, and just over half are non-Hispanic whites.

”The results are remarkable,” said Maria Potter, a resource teacher who oversees the Longfellow classes. ”After five or six years in an immersion program, students can speak, read and write in two languages, usually with no accent.”

They Do Well on Tests

Children in immersion programs appear to do as well as or better than other pupils in the basic school subjects of reading, language, arithmetic. This is true whether the children are tested in English or in a second language and regardless of social or economic background, according to tests conducted in the United States and in Canada, where the immersion technique has been used since the middle 1960’s.

Most children enter the San Diego program before they have learned to read in English. Taught first to read in Spanish, they are then able to transfer the skills to English.

”It’s a fascinating process and difficult to describe,” Mrs. Potter said. ”Essentially, your brain learns the decoding process necessary for reading only once in a lifetime.”

To augment the pupils’ knowledge of English, the school devotes about 20 percent of class time to English.

Nonetheless, pupils in the immersion classes usually experience a delay of several months in learning to read, compared with children in regular programs. This is primarily because learning to read in any language is dependent on having an oral vocabulary.

But by the end of the third grade or the beginning of the fourth the lag usually disappears.

Graduates of San Diego’s program, which involves five schools and about 850 pupils, consistently score a grade level higher than the district average on mathematical proficiency tests.

Other Cultures Accepted

Children in immersion programs also score significantly higher in measures of creativity and in their acceptance of people who are of different cultures, in part because of frequent field trips across the border to Tijuana that emphasize cultural awareness.

Sometimes the pupils find themselves stuck between the two languages. Lara Summerville, a fifth grader, described the occasional difficulty she experienced.

”Sometimes I can’t think of English words, especially ones that describe feelings,” she said. ”Those are easier to think of in Spanish.” She expressed pride in her fluency in Spanish as setting her apart from other children.

Language immersion programs began in the United States in the early 1970’s. By 1983 about 26 public elementary schools were offering either partial or total language immersion. That year about 5,400 children were enrolled nationwide, according to a study by the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington.

Dispute Over Concept

Some Mexican-American educators are critical of the concept. They say the money could be better spent on bilingual education, which focuses on pupils whose first language is Spanish. Moreover, some educators worry that the success of the language immersion technique could be used as an argument against bilingual education: if Spanish-immersion works so well for English-speaking pupils, why not simply immerse Spanish-speaking children in English?

”If that happens, Spanish-speaking children will leave their native language behind,” said Dr. Richard Pacheco, director of elementary bilingual teacher training at San Diego State University. Dr. Pacheco, who as a child was punished for speaking Spanish on the school playground, objects to the basic motivation of the San Diego program. ”In Canada, immersion is designed just to make English- speaking children bilingual. Here it’s an integration tool. There’s no screening to see if kids are already good in their own language.”

Fighting to Preserve Spanish

Some children ”fall through the cracks,” he asserted, although he added that no studies showed children had been hurt by the program.

”I agree that we’ve got to do everything we can to preserve Spanish,” Mrs. Potter said. ”Many Hispanic families, particularly the low-income families, lose their Spanish. They do it as a matter of survival.”

However, because Hispanic influence is becoming so pervasive in the Southwest, many English-speaking, middle-class residents are beginning to view Spanish as a survival tool.

Two mothers volunteering at Longfellow were asked the program’s chief benefit to their children.

Each answered, ”Jobs.”



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