Education conference this week to promote bilingual teaching

The nation’s largest bilingual education organization will meet this week to discuss ways to ensure that all new teachers are bilingual by the year 2003.

The National Association for Bilingual Education will begin its 24th annual conference Tuesday in Phoenix, Ariz., with a challenge to the nation’s schools systems, said spokesman Rick Lopez .

“With emerging nativist and xenophobic movements in the country, we want to educate people about the true benefits of multilingualism,” he said. “The nation’s educational institutions have to grapple with the fact that there are almost 10 million children who speak a language other than English at home, and ignoring this fact won’t help these schoolchildren.”

In the last decade, national studies have shown that bilingual education is an effective teaching tool to help non-English-speaking children learn math and science in their own language. Students learned English separately, until they were able to take all their classes in English, usually by third or fourth grade.

With anti-immigrant feelings running high in California, many educators fear the resurgence of anti-bilingual-education measures in other parts of the country, Mr. Lopez said.

In a world that is becoming smaller and smaller because of trade agreements and telecommunications, it would make sense to prepare all students and teachers for a global marketplace, as well their own neighborhood schools.

But nearly three of 10 teachers believe their training has not prepared them to teach students from diverse ethnic backgrounds, according to a survey by the U.S. Department of Education.

“Learning one or more additional languages gives students the ability to look at issues and ideas from multiple perspectives,” said Jim Lyons, the bilingual education association’s executive director. “It also helps the United States better relate to other countries both in a business and diplomatic sense. But it must start with our teachers.”

The organization is expecting 7,000 to 8,000 educators, administrators and parents for its conference, which is sure to be the largest multicultural, multilingual gathering in the country this year, Mr Lopez said.

For more information about the conference, call (602) 514-7880.

WFAA-TV (Channel 8) news anchor Gloria Campos says she has been the target of some angry white viewers who believe she has mispronounced the name of Mexico’s currency, the peso . They’ve called and written to tell her it should be pronounced “pay-so,” instead of the correct pronunciation of “peh-soh,” as she has pronounced it in recent stories.

There was even some debate within the newsroom as to the correct pronunciation, she said. Co-news anchors John McCaa and Tracy Rowlett have pronounced it correctly as “peh-soh,” she said, but only she has gotten the calls. Is it because she is Hispanic or the only woman anchor on the station’s evening news? She wonders.

In any case, Ms. Campos grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, always heard Spanish at home – especially from her grandmother – and she believes that to pronounce the word with a Texas or anglicized accent is “arrogant, ignorant, insensitive and wrong.”

“Viewers see Ted Koppel and others mispronounce it and assume that’s the way it should be pronounced, but they’re wrong,” Ms. Campos said. “It’s not our currency, and if Texas is one of Mexico’s biggest trading partners, then the least we can do is learn how to pronounce their currency the right way.”

Spanish-speakers couldn’t agree more.

NOTAS : The Major Theatre in Dallas will show the film Yo, La Peor de Todas (I, Worst of All), a 1990 Argentine/French release, which tells the true story of the greatest poet of 17th-century Latin America – the Mexican nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. The film was adapted from a work by Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz .

The movie, in Spanish with English subtitles, opens Friday. Show times at the theater, 2830 Samuell Blvd. at Grand Avenue, are 8 o’clock nightly except Monday, with additional showings at 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. For more information, call 821-3456. . . .

The annual Health Check at NorthPark Center is expected to draw about 100,000 people for free health screenings Saturday and Sunday . The Dallas County Medical Society and Alliance sponsor the health fair to get more people to take free cholesterol and glucose screenings, breast exams and HIV tests. The fair begins at 10 a.m. Saturday and at noon Sunday. For more information, call 948-3622.



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