Children plunging into foreign languages

S.F. programs teach all subjects bilingually

Devon Tracy, an 8-year-old African American, loves watching the expression on the faces of Chinese waiters when she orders meals in fluent Cantonese.

“Their jaws drop open and they say, “Wow.’ They’re pretty impressed, ” said Devon, a third-grader in the Chinese Immersion Program at West Portal Elementary School in San Francisco. “My mom wanted me to get two languages. Chinese is popular in San Francisco, so mom wanted me to do the Chinese program.”

The number of children like Devon who are learning an Asian language as their second or third language is on the rise in San Francisco.

“The growth has been tremendous,” said Adelina Araburo, a resource teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District’s Bilingual Department.

Immersion programs in particular “are becoming very popular,” said Jeanne Villafuerte, principal of West Portal. “We just expanded to a second kindergarten out of demand.”

Immersion education is designed to help students develop fluency and literacy in a second language by teaching regular school subjects, such as math, science, and language arts, in that language. In the Chinese immersion kindergarten, for example, 85 percent of the youngsters’ instructional time is in Cantonese.

West Portal’s Cantonese program, the first in the nation , celebrated its 10th anniversary Thursday at its annual Spring Festival. In the last decade, the program has grown from a handful of students in one classroom to more than 200 students spanning seven grades. This year, it added a middle school program at Herbert Hoover Middle School. About 40 percent of the students are non-Chinese, and nearly all come from English -speaking homes.

Another 125 students attend a kindergarten-through-fourth grade Cantonese immersion program started four years ago at Golden Gate Elementary.

Besides the Chinese programs, about 700 students attend Spanish immersion programs at Buena Vista, Cleveland, and Edison elementary schools, and James Lick Middle School, according to the San Francisco Unified School District, which in 1990 received a $ 70,000 Title VII federal grant to develop language programs.

The school district plans to start a Korean immersion program this fall. “We’re still looking for a site,” said Aramburo.

For many children, language training begins in preschool; Devon attended Wah Mei Chinese School. The Nihonmachi Little Friends School, which opened in 1975 with seven students, grew rapidly in the mid-1980s. Today, it has 82 children at two Japantown sites, and another 50 on the waiting list. Many go on to attend the Japanese bilingual program at Clarendon Elementary School.

At the private Chinese American International School in the Presidio, enrollment grew from 50 to 125 students in the past three years. It added a sixth grade two years ago and a seventh grade this year. Beginning in preschool, instructional time is split evenly between Mandarin and English.

Why the rush to raise Asian-language-speaking children?

Many teachers and parents believe that to live and thrive in the global village, tomorrow’s adults must possess greater linguistic and cultural adaptability.

“Many parents who enroll their children with us stress the growing importance of the Pacific Rim,” said Mari Matsumoto, a director at Nihonmachi Little Friends, where nearly half the preschoolers are non-Japanese.

“It’s an attitude,” added Villafuerte. “There’s more recognition that the world is getting smaller and if we’re going to compete, and get along, with our world neighbors, children have to speak other languages.”

There are benefits to the mind as well. Experts and parents find that learning a second language stimulates a child’s mental development. In fact, research has shown that bilingual youngsters are more imaginitive, better with abstract notions and more flexible in their thinking that one -language children, according to Liana Szeto, the district’s first Chinese immersion teacher and now a resource specialist at West Portal.

Despite time-tested methods and glowing reviews, parents still enroll their children with caution.

Many worry that learning two languages at the same time might confuse their children. But researchers have found this is not the case, especially for Asian languages, which are very different from English. And once children begin to gain command of the languages, they tend to better understand how language works than other children, noted Shirley Lee, principal of the Chinese American International School.

Mabel Teng, an immigrant who had to learn English after coming to the United States, was concerned that her children, Tania and Leticia, would lag behind other kids in English skills if they attended the Chinese Immersion Program.

“I know how difficult it was to catch up and I didn’t want my kids to go through the same,” said Teng.

But other parents assured Teng that immersion students, while lagging behind in English in the early grades, catch up by fifth grade and actually surpass English-only students in all subjects later.

Greater self-esteem has been an added bonus. “For my kids, Chinese is a natural part of them,” said Teng. “They are very proud of being Chinese. They call themselves “English-Chinese’ and sometimes they can’t tell between the two.”

Devon Tracy added: “I feel good about myself. It makes me feel like I’m being more than I can be.”

Parents attribute the immersion program’s success to devoted, innovative teachers and heavy parental involvement. The program requires parents to spend at least 20 minutes a day reading in English, in addition to helping with English assignments; Teng and her husband, Rick Yuen, spend one hour a day working with their two 7-year-olds.

The programs also have very active parent associations.

Learning a language in preteen years tends to come easier than later in life, according to teachers, who say children are less inhibited about making new, strange sounds and are quicker to pick up native accents.

Such findings have helped boost the image of bilingual programs, until recently relegated to the “remedial” backwaters of education. Bilingual programs have long been used to teach English to immigrants and refugees with limited proficiency in English, “but not necessarily to maintain the students’ other language skills,” said Villafuerte.

Two-way immersion, in which 60 percent of the students receive instruction in their primary language and 40 percent learn Chinese or Spanish as a second language, has replaced this teaching method, at least in San Francisco.

By adopting the two-way model, “we’re saying our society will benefit from bilingual students; that in the end, many more doors will be open to them,” said Araburo.

The state of California has gotten behind the bilingual effort. In “It’s Elementary,” a 1993 visionary statement on elementary school education, the state Department of Education stressed the importance of immersion education.

Similarly, the federal government is moving toward bilingualism. For the first time, foreign language competency has been included in the “Goals 2000: Educate America” Act and in the National Standards, the new educational benchmarks for the nation’s schools.

“The Clinton administration believes that every child in the United States should be bilingual by the time they graduate high school,” said Aramburo.



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