Reservation language program returns children to their roots

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz.—To the beat of a drum, the children chant their favorite nursery rhymes, enunciating each word of “Little Boy Blue” perfectly in Navajo.

The group of 5-year-old kindergartners are singing an updated version of Mother Goose, which has been adapted to fit their native language.

Around the classroom, the date on the board is written in Navajo. The colors and days of the week are labeled in Navajo and their English counterparts.

The children spend the first part of their day speaking only Navajo. After lunch, they return to English, which is for many, more comfortable.

The kindergarten class at Leupp Public School, a Flagstaff Unified School District school located 40 miles east of Flagstaff on the Navajo Reservation, is the pilot class for a Navajo immersion program. The program immerses the children in Navajo for the first half of the day and instructs them in English for the second half.

The program is based on a concept modeled by other immersion programs used by native Hawaiians, French-Canadians, tribes in New Zealand and other Native American tribes.

In each instance, the students who learned another language excelled more rapidly in their English studies and other subjects than monolingual counterparts. All kindergartners at Leupp participate in the program, although they are not all full-blooded Navajo.

Testing at Leupp Public School showed that a slim 10 percent of students could speak Navajo, said Mike Fillerup, bilingual education coordinator for FUSD.

Fewer and fewer of the children use their native language at home because their parents don’t speak it either, so with each generation, the language becomes more obsolete, Fillerup said. The problems presented by that shrinking number of Navajo speakers are both cultural and academic, he said. Without a strong language base, students move further and further away from their culture and they perform poorly in their studies and on the Stanford 9 tests.

Part of the problem is Leupp students have a weak language base in two languages.

“Our kids at Leupp don’t have a strong language,” said Leupp Principal Joan Gilmore said. “They are not proficient in English or in Navajo. Now, with their proficiency in Navajo increasing, the likelihood of our scores increasing are better.”

Giving students a strong foundation in their native language makes the transition to English easier, said Teresa McCarty, associate professor of language, reading and culture at the University of Arizona’s College of Education and director of the American Indian Language Development Institute.

English skills are augmented, not hindered, by learning another language, she said, which is why bilingual students constantly outperform their monolingual counterparts.

“We know from research around the world that the stronger and the longer the development in the native language, the easier it is for kids to make the transition to a second language,” McCarty said.

This theory is corroborated by research from immersion programs in Rough Rock, another city on the Navajo reservation, she said.

In Rough Rock, children in grades 1-3 improved their English reading and writing comprehension after being in the Navajo immersion program. When scores were analyzed for all students in grades 1-6, including those who had not participated in the immersion program, the bilingual students made the greatest gains and beat out their monolingual peers in every area.

The same results were found for bilingual programs in French-speaking Canada, Hawaii, New Zealand, and in the Mohawk and Choctaw American Indian tribes.

Teaching the children another language, particularly their native one, develops skills that increase their comprehension, McCarty said.

“If we start early and continue this kind of intensive language development, the students develop the ability to use multiple linguistic and processing systems that monolinguals don’t really have,” she said.

The program was funded through a $ 1.5 million, three-year federal grant for bilingual education. Each year, another grade will be added until the entire school is participating in the immersion program.

While there are many different types of bilingual programs, not all are successful, Fillerup said.

Transitional bilingual programs instruct content areas, such as math and science, in the students’ native language. The programs gradually add English until the fourth grade, when the student is instructed entirely in English.

Fillerup said transitional programs are a failure because they segregate students of different cultures and lead to students who are not proficient in English or their native language, leaving them floundering through the rest of their school years.

Fillerup said a dual-language program, similar to Navajo immersion program, is more effective. It takes native speakers of two languages and instructs the students in both languages. The program is successful, Fillerup said, because it does not segregate students and treats students of both cultures and languages as experts. It also turns out a group of students who are now bilingual, regardless of their native language. The only drawback to the program is that there has to be native speakers of both languages in the classroom.

The children in the immersion program begin their day by greeting their teachers in Navajo. They receive all their instruction in Navajo from the time they walk through the door, said teacher Annabelle Smallcanyon.

Smallcanyon has constructed poster boards with scenes on them and the children shout the Navajo name for each object as Smallcanyon points to it. The children are gradually learning to speak, but the amount of Navajo they understand is even greater, she said.

“It was hard at first,” she said. “It was very hard for the first one or two weeks.”

Learning their native language brings children closer to their culture, Fillerup said. A loss of language and culture is one of the culprits that has led to an increasing high school dropout rate among Navajos, as well as a high alcoholism and violence rate, he said.

“English is the language needed to nourish the body,” Fillerup said, paraphrasing the words of a Navajo. “It’s a given that you have to learn English. But the tribal language is the language that nourishes the spirit. Navajo students are deprived of that.”



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