In San Diego, Language Lessons Are Elementary

For the 435 students at Longfellow Elementary School in Clairemont--all of them native English speakers--the language of the day is Spanish. Similarly, hablando Espanol is also the norm for more than 200 children at Horton Elementary in Southeast San Diego, while French is the langue for 80 students at nearby Knox Elementary. At Spreckels Elementary in University City, about half the school’s 600 students master Spanish and English together in daily bilingual studies.

Welcome to the little-known world of foreign language study in San Diego elementary schools. Out of 107 schools in the San Diego Unified district and more than 100 in smaller county districts, the special magnet programs at the four schools provide the only large-scale, continuing foreign language instruction for students at the elementary level.

Although the programs get high marks from teachers, parents and independent evaluators, their special status only points up the general lack of any second-language curriculum below the secondary-school level, not only in San Diego but throughout California and the nation.

Call for Expanded Programs

A key recommendation from a June, 1987, report on the future of San Diego schools called for foreign language instruction for all elementary school students as part of expanded programs in world culture. The recommendation parallels conclusions in nationwide educational reports calling for teaching foreign language to more students and at an earlier age.

Although local school officials have acted on many parts of the 1987 independent study, they have offered no specifics regarding more language study. Even at the secondary level, administrators concede that instructional methods need revamping, with more emphasis on oral-based teaching and less on rote grammar, so that students will pick up a second language in a more natural way.

But the same administrators point to the existing magnet programs as good examples of how language instruction could better proceed if a commitment to extra money and time were made by members of the Board of Education.

Typical Classroom

A visitor entering one of the two kindergarten classes at Longfellow Elementary finds all the bulletin boards in Spanish and the class divided into several groups, with one cluster of children singing a song in Spanish, a second group reading a story in Spanish and a third practicing vocabulary with Spanish-language work sheets.

From kindergarten through second grade, children receive all instruction in Spanish. Beginning in the third grade, they receive 75 minutes of intensive English immersion so that they learn to read in English. Otherwise, the class continues in Spanish.

A similar pattern is followed at Horton and Knox as well.

“It takes a real commitment by parents to place their children in such programs,” said Tim Allen, who directs second-language instruction for the San Diego district.

The language magnets fall under the district’s special integration academic programs first set up in the late 1970s to encourage voluntary ethnic mixing and to avoid mandatory busing under court order.

At Horton and Knox, which are in predominantly minority areas, the language immersions are intended to attract Anglo students, who live outside the area, to bus to the schools. They have generally been successful in doing so. The only non-Anglo students eligible for the immersions must live in the immediate school neighborhoods.

Longfellow is one of a handful of district schools without a neighborhood focus. All students must apply for admission. All students are selected only on the basis of balancing the school ethnically, and the school has a waiting list.

“A key is that parents want to be certain that their children will still maintain their English,” Allen said. “And it is usually best for a student to enroll beginning in an early grade.”

Longfellow magnet coordinator Helen Sabala finds that many parents who visit the school for the first time express both excitement and bewilderment.

“Yes, we teach the same basic concepts of math, reading, etc., as in other schools, but in Spanish,” she recently told a group of parents who are contemplating enrolling their children at Longfellow next year.

“The teachers use a lot of repetition, a lot of body movement, such as pointing to something,” Sabala explained. “The kids listen to the Spanish and, at first, there are non-verbal responses,” such as a student handing over an object that the teacher asks for in Spanish.

“And that leads to natural conversation developing after a while,” she said.

“We begin formal English reading at the third grade, but we really encourage parents to continue reading to their children in English at all grades. We’ll take care of the Spanish,” she added.

A district evaluation last year showed that immersion students at the fifth-grade level did as well on standardized English tests in math, reading and language as their peers at regular elementary schools. In addition, the evaluation showed that the students develop Spanish-language skills comparable to students who are native Spanish speakers.

At Knox, teacher Kathleen Stark said that parents--many of whom are Francophiles--nevertheless worry about whether the reading skills taught initially in French will transfer to English.

“And they do transfer,” Stark said. “It’s sometimes quite remarkable.”

Sally McArdle at Knox, who gives the third-through-sixth graders their intensive English reading lessons, said that, by the second semester of third grade, the transfer is almost always made.

“Most already have the reading skills, and it’s just a matter of getting comfortable with English,” she said. “It’s funny when they recognize English vocabulary by its French roots. . . . ‘That’s French, isn’t it?’ you hear them say.”

At Spreckels, the bilingual magnet operates on a different philosophy. An equal number of native Spanish-speaking and English-speaking students are grouped together for part of the day for music or other enrichment in Spanish or English, but are separated by language for part of the day for basic skills instruction.

The Spanish speakers bus to Spreckels from southeast San Diego; the English speakers are University City children whose parents choose the program. Anglo students from outside the area are not eligible.

Support for Program

The parents of Spanish-speaking natives have supported the Spreckels program strongly for almost a decade. For them, the curriculum allows their children not only to learn English but to maintain their Spanish, unlike regular district ESL instruction for the majority of Latino students, which is intended only to increase English fluency.

Parents of neighborhood children have been much slower to warm to the program, afraid that their children will suffer by not spending their entire day in an English curriculum. The fear has diminished, administrators said, since the district added a gifted enrichment component in English to the program four years ago.

“The Spanish kids hear a lot more English here than they do in ESL at a school predominantly Latino,” said Linda Giles, who teaches kindergarten at Spreckels. “And the Caucasian kids are hearing Spanish in real-life situations too, such as on the playground. . . . We as teachers try to give a sense of being truly bilingual by sometimes talking in Spanish just to show that is all right too.”

Added fifth- and sixth-grade teacher Ivelisse Druid: “There’s lots of oral work here, both with teachers and with each other. And we mix some of the reading groups as well.”

Patti Garretson put her son, Andrew, in the program because she wants him to know Spanish growing up in Southern California.

“I work at (UC San Diego) Medical Center, and I know the importance of having a second language . . . and while some parents do fear that the program takes away from English instruction, I have found that the kids do most of their reading, writing and math in English.”

Although Garretson considered the immersion programs, she believes in sending her children to neighborhood schools.

The Spreckels teachers, while saying that Spanish immersion for English speakers is a choice for parents to make, do not believe that a similar English immersion--instead of a bilingual focus--would work for Spanish speakers.

Sink-or-Swim English

“First of all, the Hispanic kids in sink-or-swim English would not get the academic support at home that Caucasian kids get in English while in a Spanish immersion,” second-grade teacher Lydia Stevens said, adding that in the present immersion, the point is to teach students Spanish and not to replace their native language.

Giles said research shows immersions work best when the language of immersion is in “the so-called lower-status language,” which in the United States would be Spanish.

Teachers in both the bilingual and immersion programs complained that there is poor articulation for graduating sixth-graders wishing to continue their language study at the junior-high level. Second-language coordinator Allen conceded that the problem is not only with the lack of follow-up courses in most cases but with different methods of teaching at the secondary level.

“The new framework from the California Department of Education calls for teaching extensively through dialogue, through oral communication, but our texts still emphasize orderly grammar, and many of our teachers haven’t had training in new methods,” Allen said. “But this is the way we want to go, both at secondary and also at elementary levels, if we can begin (more widespread) instruction at those grades.”

Sandra Scherf, a La Jolla High School foreign-language teacher who has been trained in the new methodology, said that “too many (secondary) students now go through a program and learn to conjugate and read literature, but can’t speak with any proficiency.”

“We want students to give responses that can be understood, even if they are grammatically incorrect at first . . . with further exposure and practice, the errors get tidied up without resorting just to drills on verbs,” she said.

Most students leaving the existing elementary language magnets end up in the more traditional programs ill-suited to the preparation they have had.

Magnet Fails to Attract

Students in the Spreckels program are eligible to continue to a bilingual magnet at Correia Junior High in Point Loma. Almost all the Spanish-speaking students go on to Correia, because the bus ride there is no longer than that to Spreckels from their southeast San Diego homes.

But no neighborhood magnet student from the University City area has ever attended Correia, because residents perceive that Standley Junior High, their community school, has better academic programs, teachers said.

As a result, Correia magnet teachers must recruit new Anglo students from the Point Loma area who have had little or no Spanish study and therefore are far behind their bilingual Spanish counterparts. The Spreckels students who go on to Standley discover that the Spanish classes there are geared more for beginning study.

“Standley truly has an outstanding academic program, so the parents are reluctant to send their kids outside of the University City area,” Allen said. “But, because of the nature of the magnet philosophy--it is set up to promote integration--the continuing magnet isn’t at Standley.”

Allen has worked on getting a better relationship between teaching styles at Spreckels and Standley.

“Since the majority of Standley classes must be geared to beginning students, I would like to see maybe one class geared to a continuation of what is done at Spreckels,” he said.

Similarly, students at Longfellow, Horton and Knox are eligible to continue intensive language instruction at Memorial Junior High in Barrio Logan. But the majority choose to attend their neighborhood junior highs, in part because Memorial is considered a “dangerous” school due to its location, despite a high-powered magnet emphasizing languages and world culture.