Summer Classes Help Immigrant Students Find Way in New World

Vacation time is the perfect time for an innovative program to help recently arrived immigrant students improve their English and learn skills that will help them in school, Los Angeles school district officials say.

Now in their second year, newcomer classes are being offered at 20 San Fernando Valley schools--eight elementaries, seven junior highs and five senior highs. There are 427 of the classes at 106 schools in the district.

Newcomers are defined as students who have been in this country for less than three years. Those students are eligible for special classes as part of a $4.3-million federally funded Emergency Immigration Education Assistance Program.

This summer, more than 9,500 of the district’s newcomers will attend the six-week sessions. They are conducted exclusively in English, in contrast with bilingual or English as a second language classes the students attend during the regular school year.

What the students study is of secondary consideration in this program. History, cooking, storytelling--activities that get students to talk and ask questions--are the kinds of academic exercises that fill the day.

“This is not a grammar-based program, but a natural approach to working at language acquisition,” said Lila Silvern, the program’s coordinator. “There’s lots of music, lots of art, lots of enrichment. We don’t want quiet classrooms. We want lots of talking.”

In addition, there is an emphasis on school-survival skills as well as general information about American culture.

At Sun Valley Junior High School, students learn definitions for words and phrases such as “gymnasium,” “cafeteria” and “absence slip.” At Telfair Elementary School in Pacoima, survival training includes having a police officer explain the meaning of red, yellow and green traffic lights.

“Most people take it for granted that the only thing these kids have to learn is English,” said Lance Egan, a newcomer teacher at Sun Valley Junior High. “It’s more than that. They have to learn a new way of life.”

According to Silvern, about 10% of the district’s 579,000 students have been in the United States for less than three years. District demographers estimate that an additional 10% to 15% are children of recent immigrants or are foreign-born children who have been in the United States for more than five years.

Educators say some U.S.-born children of non-English-speaking parents or of immigrants who have been here for more than three years, and black children who live in homes where non-standard English is spoken could also benefit from an intensive language-development program such as the newcomer classes. But because of federal government restrictions, these students cannot take part.

“It’s one of the most frustrating parts about a wonderful program,” said Marvin Silver, principal of Selma Avenue Elementary School in Hollywood. “There are a lot of kids out there who could really be helped by a program like this.”

Offered in Summer

In the San Fernando Valley, immigrant children are concentrated in the East Valley. In other areas of the county, immigrant populations are heaviest in East Los Angeles, the Hollywood and Wilshire corridor areas and southeastern cities such as South Gate and Huntington Park.

If a school has a large immigrant student population, the principal may request that newcomer classes be offered. Because so many immigrant students attend year-round schools where vacations are staggered, newcomer classes are held throughout the year. But the majority of such classes are offered in the summer.

Newcomer participation is voluntary, and the program is popular. At Pacoima’s Telfair Elementary, for instance, 455 students applied, but there was room for only 255 in classes of no more than 20 each, led by a teacher and a teaching assistant.

Elementary students are not graded, but junior and senior high students receive marks for classes, which are counted as elective courses.

No Set Curriculum

There is no set curriculum. Each teacher decides on a game plan that will ignite the students’ interest and get them talking.

“This is not the kind of program for a teacher who likes to work strictly from a book,” said Ricardo Sosapavon, summer school principal at Telfair. “You have to have a lot of creativity. You have to really be an educator.”

Newcomer teachers say the academic freedom is a heady experience. The go-ahead to experiment with unconventional teaching techniques has resulted in classes taking diverse directions. No two newcomer classes are alike.

Exemplifying this are Sun Valley Junior High School’s newcomer classes, with students age 13 to 15 from Mexico, Central America and a few from Southeast Asia. During the first week of summer school, teacher Daniel Balbuena had students work on simple reading and writing lessons to give him an idea of their academic capabilities.

Studying Lady Liberty

Students especially liked reading about the Statue of Liberty, which celebrated its 100th anniversary July 4. There were history lessons, reading assignments and current-events reports on the statue. Balbuena brought in a videotape of the movie “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins,” in which the hero fights off a gang of villains while precariously perched on Lady Liberty.

“The kids really like to see movies, and it helps with their English,” Balbuena said. “If they don’t understand what is being said, they can just ask, but you would be surprised at what they understand and how quickly they pick up on what’s going on.”

Next door, Egan had one group working with a teaching assistant on identifying body parts while he worked with another group on “connecting words” such as “and,” “or,” “but” and “because.”

To get the concept across, Egan had groups of four students stand in front of the room and tell a chain story--a student would begin with one word and the next student would come up with a word that would logically follow. The goal was to make a complete sentence using a connecting word.

Taping Voices

After the students had created their first set of sentences, Egan asked them to repeat the exercise so he could record it. When he played it back, there were squeals of disbelief because it was the first time most of the children had heard their own voices on tape.

During the first week of her newcomer class, Evelyn Wilson took her students on a tour of the school. She showed them the principal’s office, the attendance office, the cafeteria and the gym.

Back in the classroom, Wilson wrote school survival words on the blackboard. The students then alphabetized the words and looked them up in the dictionary.

During lunch, the work continued. Although teachers and aides usually don’t eat with the children, at newcomer sessions they join with students in the cafeteria, showing them such things as how to maneuver a food tray or how to properly use a fork.

Learning the Basics

“Many of these kids have never been in a cafeteria before. They need to learn the basics,” said Roberta Fine, a teacher at Telfair. “A lot of times, they have never tasted the food served in the cafeteria. We have to explain what the food is and get them to at least taste it.”

Every newcomer school has a psychologist and a health teacher assigned to work with the students. The psychologist meets with the students at least once a week.

The sessions give the students a chance to express their likes, dislikes and feelings. They also give professionals a chance to spot students from war-ravaged countries in Central America and Southeast Asia who may need help overcoming emotional scars that might keep them from doing well academically.

“The saddest thing in the world is to see some youngster sitting in a corner of the classroom, not participating, not communicating, really hurting because of experiences he or she may have had before they got here,” said Silver, principal of Selma Avenue Elementary, which has 13 newcomer classes this summer.

“Hopefully, we can identify the kids who have problems and get them help at the earliest possible moment,” he said.

Health, Nutrition Taught

Newcomer health classes focus on a range of topics from how to use a toothbrush to proper nutrition. First aid is taught, and all children learn to use the 911 emergency telephone number.

Junior and senior high students meet with school counselors to learn about graduation requirements and college scholarship opportunities.

And there are field trips, which teachers say are the most important part of the curriculum. Excursions to the local post office, fire stations, beaches and museums expand the horizons of students, most of whom have never ventured very far from their neighborhoods.

Expanding Vocabulary

Aside from being fun, the trips can build vocabulary. The out-of-classroom experiences introduce the students to new words and situations.

For instance, a visit to the Museum of Science and Industry by sixth-grade students from Selma Avenue introduced the youngsters to wind tunnels and jet engines. When they returned to school, they wrote short accounts of the exhibit they liked best.

“Without a trip to a museum, this youngster would have never been able to do this,” sixth-grade teacher Cathleen Loeser said as she examined a student’s paper on propulsion. “This word just doesn’t crop up in the everyday world of these kids.”

There are no formal studies on whether grades and test scores of students who have been in the program are different from immigrant students who have not participated.

Teachers and principals, however, say newcomer alumni appear more confident when speaking English and make a quicker adjustment to school life than immigrant students who have not attended the special classes.