Bilingual Classes Chirp With Activity

Experiments with Spanish- and English-speaking students in the same class seem to thrive.

It was time for a social studies unit on recycling, and Carpentersville kindergarten teacher Liz Garcia held up an assortment of twigs, leaves, soda bottles and paper wrappers.

“Que puede hacer con esto?” What can you make with this? she asked in Spanish. Her young students needed no translation.

“La casa,” a house, Becky Umbdenstock, 5, an English-speaking student, quickly responded in Spanish.

“You can make a toy airplane out of the trash,” Tony Kick, 6, added in English.

Garcia accepted and confirmed both answers in Spanish, as she does 80 percent of the day in her dual-language class.

Placing a mixture of native-Spanish-speaking children and native-English-speaking children together in class, and then teaching them largely in Spanish, is a growing experiment in the Chicago suburbs.

Elementary School District 54, based in Schaumburg, and Unit School District 300 in Carpentersville are the first schools in Illinois outside Chicago to try such programs, officials say.

Now in its second year, the program has the goal of having children stay together through the 8th grade.

North Shore Elementary School District 112, with schools in Highland Park and Highwood, is researching a dual-language program for next fall, with room for 140 kindergarten and 1st-grade students.

So far, parents of 70 children have expressed interest, according to district officials, who have scheduled an informational meeting on the subject for Thursday.

Teachers speak to the dual-language classroom pupils as though the children were fluent in Spanish, treating them much as a parent would when teaching a child to talk.

Basic academic activities like studying the calendar, counting, learning about science by watching fertilized eggs hatch into chicks and studying worldwide cultures are taught in Spanish, said Linda Kolbusz, director of Project BUILD (Building Unity through Integrated Language Development).

Language arts is taught in a child’s native language, she said.

Kolbusz said Project BUILD officials initially had a tough time convincing parents to enroll their children in the dual-language class.

Parents were afraid their children would not only fall behind their classmates, but that their native language development would slip because of the second language, she said.

Kolbusz could only point to research conducted on existing programs in California and on the East Coast that showed students doing as well or better than their peers.

OER Associates of Wilmette, an education evaluation research consulting firm, studied Project BUILD and concluded that “dual-language students are making gains in both English and Spanish.

“Their participation in the project has not set them back educationally, as many parents had feared,” said the firm’s director, Sue Rasher, in a report to the Carpentersville and Schaumburg school districts.

Hoffman Estates parent Donna Tucker has a daughter, Sarah, 6, enrolled in the second year of the District 54 program.

“They learn a second language without knowing they’re learning it. My husband and I learned Spanish in high school, and we both retained so little,” Tucker said.

While interest is growing in the Districts 54/300 program, not every school district has had success. Elementary School District 15, based in Palatine, disbanded its dual-language program after three years, said Joseph Negron, director of state and federal programs there.

Negron attributed the failure to beginning the program too late in a child’s academic life. District 15’s dual-language program began in 4th grade.

“Most of the research being done on dual language indicates the earlier you start it, the more successful the program,” Negron said.

“Our kids weren’t getting enough exposure to the language,” he explained.

In contrast to the Schaumburg-Carpentersville experience, Rondout Elementary School District 72 in Lake County was forced by its very size–only 93 pupils in the one-school district–to go the opposite direction.

Almost all classrooms lessons are in English, regardless of a child’s native language. But for a couple of hours a week, as part of a “Hispanic culture” class, Spanish is the only classroom language.

There, some Latino children say they appreciate the culture class, because they’re under pressure from parents to retain at least a portion of their native language so they can communicate with family members.

Diana Valadez, a 10-year-old 4th grader at Rondout School, said she appreciates the English instruction because it’s helped her learn the language quickly.

However, Diana added, “My father told me, ‘Diana, you speak so much English, I think one day you will lose Spanish.’ “

Diana’s 9-year-old sister, Janet, a 3rd grader, agreed: “My Dad worries about losing Spanish because my Grandma and Grandpa only speak Spanish, and he is worried we won’t be able to talk to them any more.”

While many advantages are given to English-speaking participants in dual-language programs, Judith Kwiat, Project BUILD site director, said there are significant gains for the Spanish-speaking population as well.

She said research states that despite costly reforms in the last 20 years aimed at reversing a pattern of academic failure among many minority students, dropout rates remain relatively high.

Kwiat said she believes one reason for that is the “pull-out” type bilingual programs common in schools today in which native-Spanish speaking children are taught English.

“Pull-out programs are considered to be remedial, label and stigmatize students, hurt a student’s self-esteem and foster low expectations,” Kwiat asserted.

“In these programs, there is limited use of the children’s first language or culture, and the hidden message that students often receive is that English is good and their native language is bad.”



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