Teaching Mandarin, French, Spanish, and Arabic to elementary school kids is a fad that’s starting to eke its way into public schools across the country. But these classes aren’t like typical language classes for adults, which might run for an hour a day, four times a week, and that’s all the exposure you get.
With these programs, students are submerged in the language, not just taught to understand the words. They’re immersed for at least half of their day, five days a week, through math, history, constant conversation, and interaction.
By some views, this is merely a way to incorporate the world’s fast-growing movement toward a global culture into the classroom. Some people see it as a way for children to keep speaking the language of their parents.
The programs are bilingual—taught in English and whatever the second language is. It’s a concept known as dual immersion, and more than 300 schools are administrating such programs in California.
Schools in Ventura and San Luis Obispo have been running successful Spanish/English programs for longer than a decade. Arthur Hapgood Elementary School in the Lompoc Unified School District just completed year one of the district’s first such program. A group of Santa Maria educators and parents—fresh from attending this summer’s Association of Two-Way and Dual Immersion Education conference in San Diego—wants to get a program going in the Santa Maria-Bonita School District.
“Just speaking English or just speaking Spanish, it really shuts you down to half the community,” said Feliciano Aguilar, a school psychologist with Santa Maria-Bonita who attended the conference. “What we would like is small—that way, it can be successful. That way, if people don’t want to have anything to do with it, they don’t have to.”
But before Aguilar and his fellow proponents take steps in the program-making process, they said they need support from the community.
“If I ask for a program like this, I’m going to be told no,” said Laura Henderson, a kindergarten teacher at Robert Bruce Elementary and a parent. “But if the community asks for it, that’s a different story.”
Henderson, Aguilar, and others in favor of starting a Santa Maria dual immersion program have been meeting since 2011, but the plan for what it would look like, which school would take on a dual-immersion program, and getting a green light from Santa Maria-Bonita is still a way off.
Every dual immersion program starts small the first year, with one grade: kindergarten. It grows from there, essentially following the first kindergarten class as students progress up the elementary-school ladder. The second year of a program would include kindergarten and first-grade classes learning the special Spanish/English mix.
Ideally, half the students are English learners, while half are English speakers.
There are two popular methods of teaching, through a 50/50 ratio—50 percent English and 50 percent Spanish—or through a 90/10 ratio—where 90 percent of class is taught in Spanish during the kindergarten year. The 90/10 ratio becomes 80/20 in first grade, 70/30 in second, and eventually becomes a 50/50 ratio. Most schools have two teachers; one is dedicated to speaking English and one to Spanish. Students are split into two classes, and they alternate between the teachers.
Hapgood Elementary in Lompoc chose the 90/10 ratio. Students spent the majority of the year steeped in Spanish. The breakdown in the class is about one-third English speakers, one-third English learners, and one-third already bilingual.
School principal Carmen Chavez said she’s excited about how smoothly the first year of the program went and the progress of students.
“They’re really getting ready to be global citizens,” she said. “I wish I had my own little ones to put into the class.”
Chavez said the state has a target word list for what children should know after they complete their kindergarten year. One hundred percent of the students in the dual immersion class hit both the 25-word and 60-word lists, and 60 percent of the students hit the 100-word list—which is a first-grade target.
“This is above normal,” Chavez said. “But, you have invested parents and excited teachers.”
Parents chose to enroll their children in the program, and the two teachers lobbied for dual immersion to start in Lompoc. She said the combination of encouragement from both school and home really makes an environment where students can be successful. And although the class was mostly taught in Spanish, she said parents of English learners were surprised about how much English their children were speaking.
Chavez added that the exciting thing about teaching language to young children is how quickly they pick it up.
“In regards to linguistics, when we’re born, we’re linguistic geniuses,” Chavez said. “When we’re young we have the ability to pick up languages to near-native status.”
The program at Hapgood is already growing. Chavez said there’s a waiting list for the 2013-14 kindergarten class, and some students transferred into the program for the 2013-14 first-grade class.
The big push for dual immersion started in 2010-11 within the Lompoc Unified School District. It took a year and a half to two years to start the program once the district signed off on it.
Henderson, the kindergarten teacher from Bruce Elementary, said proponents are hoping to garner support within the community at the beginning of the 2013-14 school year. Then, they can work out a plan of attack to pitch a dual immersion program to the Santa Maria-Bonita School Board. Henderson said she’s spoken with some people at the district about the program, and the response was positive.
She said while a program like this could cause a stir, she thinks it could also ultimately bring people together.
“One of the goals of our program is to change the cultural divide in our community,” Henderson said.
Contact Staff Writer Camillia Lanham at clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 8-15, 2013.