Pupils Take The Plunge En Espanol

Immersion Program Expands

Mrs. Hahn’s 27 first-graders file in to class at the start of the day and begin shedding their winter coats. Suddenly, the Pledge of Allegiance comes booming through the speaker on the wall, and the three-foot-tall children struggle to their feet, their hands over their hearts.

But the words out of their mouths are different from those spoken by students in other classrooms:

“Juro fidelidad a la bandera de Los Estados Unidos de Norte America y a la republica que simboliza . . . “

The students are part of a new language immersion program at Henderson Elementary School in Montclair, where youngsters learn half their course work in Spanish. The program, the first of its kind in Prince William County, started last year and has expanded so that 106 of the school’s 207 first- and second-graders are saying buenos dias when classes begin each day instead of good morning.

The school’s principal hopes the program will grow until half of the school’s students are participating by fall 1998.

“How many of us were taught a foreign language in high school or college . . . and never retain it?” Principal Charles Ricks asked. “These children will be bilingual by the time they finish middle school. They could be fluent in three languages by the time they finish high school.”

Teachers in the program provide math and science instruction — half the course work — in Spanish. The other half of the day, students learn reading and language arts in English from other teachers.

In Diana Hahn’s classroom, there are no English words. Everything is labeled in Spanish, even the animal posters illustrating the primary colors — verde, azul, blanco instead of green, blue and white. On another wall are the numbers uno dos tres along with days of the week Domingo, Lunes, Martes.

The entire time the children are with Senora Hahn, they never hear her speak anything but Spanish. A bilingual teacher’s aide, Maria Hamilton, roams the room with her, intently watching and translating Hahn’s words when students don’t understand.

“Only when I’m sure they don’t understand do I begin to translate,” Hamilton said. “In the beginning, I was translating all the time. Now I don’t do it as much. The kids understand.”

On a recent morning, the students gathered in front of a large calendar labeled in Spanish. Hahn asked them to name the date of the second Saturday in November, then the fourth Monday. Without flinching, the hands eagerly went up, and students responded in Spanish before moving on to sing songs in their new language.

In a second-grade class down the hall, Senorita Marie Arnold’s students were studying the rain forest. Each picked an animal and then described in Spanish its size and how it lives.

In Arnold’s classroom, everything from the clock to the garbage can is labeled with Spanish translations.

During class, 7-year-old Sarah Linden-Brooks asked Arnold in English where she should put her assignment. Arnold responded in Spanish. The second-grader headed to her desk as instructed.

Like Linden-Brooks, the children in the program seem to respond just as quickly to Spanish as English and naturally go between the two languages. By learning a language so early, when they are “like sponges,” students will learn more quickly, teachers say.

“It was kind of hard at the beginning because I didn’t know how to translate things,” said 7-year-old Jacalyn Albright, who said she now teaches Spanish to her older sister and younger brother. “But it’s getting easier every day.”

The teachers say students are learning more than language skills. They also emphasize the cultural enrichment the students are gaining.

“This way, the kids learn at an early age to be open to other cultures and to different ways of life,” said Arnold, who used to teach bilingual classes in Texas. “There’s a whole other world they’re able to reach.”

Teachers say leading such classes is more physically tiring. Instructors have to gesture much more often, be more conscious about eye contact and exaggerate their motions.

Teachers also say it’s difficult to find classroom materials in Spanish, forcing many to translate the course work themselves.

And those who teach the English portion of the class are placed under greater stress. Each Spanish/English pair of teachers in the program has 54 students. So the English-speaking teacher must teach all of them to read in their native language, and she has to do it in a condensed period of time — on a standardized math test than those not in the program. The school will have to wait until the students take the Iowa Test of Basic Skills this year before they can do more in-depth comparisons.

Parents so far have been supportive, saying their children will need another language to be competitive in the job market in the next century. The majority responding to a survey were pleased, and several have said they think their children’s career prospects will be improved in an increasingly multicultural world.

“She has a jump,” said Claudia Lee, whose daughter Elizabeth is in the program. “Her generation will have to be bilingual.”

Among the teachers, there was more of a divergence of opinions. Although more than two-thirds of those responding to a survey by the administration were supportive, a third said they were undecided about whether they thought students in the immersion program adequately were learning basic skills in English.

Although this is the first school in the county to try such a project, other school districts have had similar programs in place for several years. The country’s first immersion program started in a Culver City, Calif., elementary school 25 years ago. Now there are 187 such programs throughout the country, including several in Fairfax County, Arlington and Alexandria.

The country’s first French immersion program started in Montgomery County in 1974.

Although Spanish remains the most popular immersion course, there has been a recent surge in Japanese courses.



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