Children Lap Up Foreign Tongues : Education: Elementary school children in Irvine are learning foreign languages in after-school classes. Organizers hope the classes will become part of the curriculum.

Sixth-grader Joey Stice, blond and freckle-faced, scrunches up his nose and frowns, wondering what to do with the colored construction paper in front of him.

His teacher, Kate Halpin, has issued simple enough instructions: “ Couvrez vos oreilles avec du papier bleu .”

Kartheek Nagappala, sitting across from Joey, immediately puts a sheet of blue paper over his ears, as do some of the other children who have caught on. Joey finally gets it and covers his ears, too.

The pupils, some as young as 8, are in Halpin’s after-school French class at Irvine’s Brywood Elementary School. For an entire hour, they listen intently as red-headed Halpin runs about the classroom animatedly, asking her young charges to point to the clock, to hold up a yellow paper, to count to 20, to draw a red ball or to name the days of the week--all in French.

“ Magnifique! “ she says in approval. “ C’est bon! C’est bon! “

While other children might have gone straight from school to soccer practice, piano lessons or Boy Scout meetings, 289 young children in the Irvine Unified School District spent two afternoons a week last semester in classes such as Halpin’s, learning another language. They are part of a growing trend in schools throughout the country to teach children as young as kindergarten age a foreign language.

From Culver City to Detroit, parents and educators are recognizing that if America is to stay competitive in the world market, the ability to speak only English is no longer good enough.

The language classes are not required fare in Irvine. In fact, the idea to offer the courses is entirely parent-driven and parent-funded. The district, however, has allowed the organizing group to offer the classes at 17 school campuses, most of the time using instructors who teach the language courses at area high schools.

The hope, says Cindy Peronto, one of the parent-organizers, is that eventually the district will provide funding and help disprove a saying well-known in foreign language instruction circles: A trilingual person is someone who speaks three languages. A bilingual person speaks two languages. A monolingual person is an American.

“We Americans are so behind the times,” Peronto said. “It’s foolish to think we can keep being a monolingual society if we want to compete in this world.”

On Tuesday, the second session of Irvine’s pilot program gets under way. Peronto says enthusiasm for the courses has been so high that this time around Russian and Japanese are being added to a list of offerings that already includes Spanish, French, German, Latin and Chinese. The program also will offer a class in sign language.

“We can’t wait until high school before we begin to teach children foreign languages,” she said. “It’s amazing how fast these little ones learn and how eager they are to try to speak another language.”

For many of the children, some who have never had foreign language instruction, the lessons are mind-boggling. But in Halpin’s class, pupils as young as third grade said they would rather spend their time learning to pronounce the nasal sounds of the French language than be somewhere else.

“I think it’s important to speak another language, especially Spanish, because there are so many Spanish-speaking people here,” said Megan Crowley, a sixth-grader in Halpin’s class. “French is another language I want to learn, and it’s fun.”

The only time Halpin speaks to her pupils in English is at the beginning of the class, when she tells them to stand up and stretch to get rid of the day’s weariness before they launch into the intense hour of foreign language instruction.

“OK, have we got our yah-yahs out now?” she asks them.

Most of the children in this class are sixth-graders, but the program allows for participants of any age. Some of Halpin’s pupils have studied foreign languages before, especially those who have recently moved to the area from school districts outside of California.

“We were so disappointed when we moved here from Chicago that the public schools don’t offer foreign language in the elementary grades,” said Vicki Chen, whose 8-year-old daughter, Ellen, is in Halpin’s class. “In Chicago schools, it was compulsory.

“After the age of 15, they say your tongue starts to be a little less flexible,” she said. “I think the world is getting so small because of transportation advances and the media, that I want my children to take advantage of the cultural opportunities available to them.”

Her other daughter, Nicole, 11, has taken three years of German. “When we went to Europe, she translated for us,” Chen said.

At the state level, the push for foreign language instruction is also receiving more attention. Last year, State Supt. of Schools Bill Honig published the Foreign Language Framework for kindergarten through 12th grade, which guides school districts toward more and earlier instruction. The aim is to make foreign language classes a state requirement at the elementary level.

As California becomes more economically competitive with Pacific Rim and European nations, Honig said, “proficiency in another language is no longer a luxury, but a necessity.”

Foreign language is not being provided as part of the curriculum in the lower grades at any other Orange County school, so Irvine would be the first if parents can persuade board members that it is worth the time and effort.

A group of parents in the Tustin Unified School District has been sponsoring a similar but much smaller after-school program for more than 20 years, but the district has not made the courses part of the curriculum.

At Brywood, Principal Stu Cunningham said Irvine’s changing student population has magnified the need for multilingual instruction.

“Irvine is very much a salad bowl in terms of students from around the world,” he said. “There are 57 different languages spoken in our district. There is a real need to make students aware of other languages spoken in our own community as well as to give them an entree to their careers later on.”

Cunningham would like to see the program move into the school’s curriculum. “You can always make time in the school day to add another program,” he said.

For parents who worry that foreign language classes will get in the way of other subjects, there is a multitude of examples of districts throughout the state that have made a solid commitment to teaching children a foreign language while still maintaining academic achievement in other areas.

The Culver City school district has one of the oldest foreign language immersion programs in the country. Kindergarten pupils and first-graders in participating schools are taught entirely in Spanish and continue to receive a few hours of Spanish a day throughout the rest of their elementary school instruction.

Madeline Ehrlich, founder of Advocates for Foreign Language Learning, the parent support group in Culver City, said her district’s program has helped turn out children fluent in both English and Spanish and who do well academically.

She said the program was controversial when it was started in 1971 because parents feared that children would fall behind in other subjects. But that fear has been largely overcome in her district, and she says it can happen in other schools, too.

“There’s plenty of research that shows that if you’re educated in English, you will be educated in Spanish, or another language,” she said. “You only learn to read once. If you’re a good reader in English, you will be a good reader in another language. If you’re intelligent in Italian, you’re intelligent in English.”

She said 47 school systems throughout the country offer immersion, or partial immersion programs for foreign language instruction. She called programs such as Irvine’s, that offer only after-school and parent-funded programs, “half-baked.”

“You do not learn a foreign language by studying it 20 minutes a day,” she said.

Peronto agrees with Erhlich that for the language classes to succeed, the district must show a commitment. But she says it has to begin with parent support.

“I want to see it taught during school too,” she said. “But my hope is that by having it after school first, the desire in the community will become so strong, and then parents will cry out and say, ‘let’s put some money into it.’ ”