District Sells Its System for English : S.D. Unified Wrote Curriculum for Non-Native Students

At first, second-grade teacher Diane Curiel was skeptical about the new method for teaching English to non-native speakers.

But now in her second year of using the comprehensive curriculum developed by the San Diego Unified School District, the Logan Elementary School teacher says her pupils are making “quantum leaps” in English proficiency, that many are “truly reaching the status of being bilingual” and that more children are making the transition to regular classes than ever before.

Curiel and her fellow teachers aren’t the only ones impressed with the program.

Commercial textbook publishers have been vying for rights to the curriculum, and Tuesday the Board of Education voted to license Santillana Publishing Co. Inc. to market the materials worldwide. The licensing is the first time that district-created educational materials have been marketed commercially.

Could Make $1 Million

The district will receive a non-refundable advance of $120,000 in the first year against royalties from sales, and royalties of 4% on the first $3 million of net sales and 6% of net sales beyond $3 million. Annual royalties could be as high as $1 million, Kay Freebern, director of the instructional media services department, told the board.

All money will go toward new textbook purchases because the district is short of funds in that area.

In addition, San Diego would receive a 40% discount on materials printed by Santillana if the district decided to buy the commercial version rather than continue printing its own.

The program is known as ELEPS, for “English for Limited English Proficient Students.”

The district’s second-language educators began developing ELEPS in 1982 after concluding that no textbooks or materials met the needs of the area’s rapidly growing number of non-English students. After several years of tryouts in selected schools, the program was instituted districtwide last year.

Under state law, limited-proficiency students spend about 30 minutes a day in special English programs at the elementary-school level and about an hour a day at the secondary level. The rest of the time is divided between normal course instruction in English and in their native language--depending on the course and the particular school district--until they score highly enough to graduate into all English courses.

Comprehensive Program

“What makes ELEPS unique is that it is not only comprehensive but that it can accommodate students from kindergarten through secondary grades,” said Tim Allen, second-language education director.

“It goes way beyond teaching survival skills,” said Sandra Plaskon, one of the program’s four writers. “So many ESL (English as a Second Language) programs consider themselves complete once they have taught names, locations in a community and the like.”

The idea behind the ELEPS curriculum, Plaskon said, is to give children who are limited in English the necessary skills for full participation in classroom instruction.

The curriculum emphasizes language used in math, social studies, literature and other specific disciplines, promoting language as a skill to use for many subjects and not just for interpersonal communication.

“We’re using information from (various) content areas in a way that students learn vocabulary and other skills related to the areas,” Allen said. The ELEPS curriculum is also linked to the particular material being taught at the grade level of the limited-English student.

For example, in the math area, students in early elementary grades will learn terminology such as “equals,” “is greater than” and “what is the sum of?” They also are given oral math problems so they will be able to understand how the terms connect to mathematics. In higher grades, the students are already familiar with those concepts in their own language, so teachers will spend more time with newer material, such as pre-algebra terms.

Communication Is Key

“And we use a natural language approach when we write lessons so that we don’t depend on drill and repeat, or on teaching them mainly about grammar and verb tenses,” Plaskon said. “Communication is what is important. When the kids begin to make a response in English, we accept the response, gladly and with joy, rather than stopping them right then and there and correcting their grammar.

“Toward the end of the program (generally three years), we start getting into the specifics of correct verb tense, or adding ‘-ing’ when you’re supposed to.”

Curiel, who has been an ESL teacher for seven years, found herself reluctant at first to give up teaching by rote because that method leads steadily, if slowly, to language progress.

“But here I have seen a flowering in my students, with children now who have never had formal English reading training before this year being able to pick up an English book and read it,” Curiel said.

In ELEPS, teachers such as Curiel not only say the meaning of a word but show it as well.

“It’s the way you teach your own child any language, such as showing that an orange is round with your hand at the same time you say the word,” Curiel said.

At the beginning, Curiel said the program was traumatic for her because she would do a lot of talking without receiving many responses. In the drill method used before, a teacher would not move on to a second lesson until each child had memorized certain lists.

‘The Method Works’

“The new method works, and when the child suddenly opens up with language, it lasts,” Curiel said. “But getting teachers to realize that at first was difficult.

“Now, for example, I have second-graders entering into Stage 3, where they are into making maps of the world, and learning the continents in English, and being able to make graphs in English.

“There is a richness there that was not in the previous method nor in any other program I have ever seen. In teaching by the rote method, those concepts would be almost impossible to get across since you would spend so much time having them mimic vocabulary that they would lose the idea of what is behind it.”

Plaskon said that she and others involved with the program “are really proud since it was a really long haul and quite an experience revising and getting people to use it.”