ESL Teachers Learn to Adapt Classrooms in a Foreign Setting : Schools: Tina McCunney uses legal disputes, news and real-life issues in experimental English classes for immigrant students, who find the lessons more interesting and useful.

As San Diego city schools officials struggle to improve the lot of immigrant students, they are coming up with new programs that resemble those that were successful a hundred years ago with previous waves of newcomers.

Teacher Tina McCunney’s approach with Indochinese and Latino students in her experimental civics classes recalls the efforts by social workers at the turn of the century who stressed “the human significance” of America, in addition to reading and writing, in educating impoverished Eastern European immigrants

So when seventh-grader John Pham is asked about things he has learned in McCunney’s novel English as a Second Language, or ESL, class, his unabashed response echoes the sentiments that a student with social worker Jane Addams might have expressed at her famous Hull House center in Chicago in the early 1900s.

“About the good way to live, about the way you would like people to treat you . . . like how to help old people, to push the (walk) button for them at a red light because they can’t see . . . about the right things to do,” replied the Wilson Middle School student.

Pham and other students in McCunney’s “Language through Leadership” class aren’t embarrassed to talk about the positive things they have learned, nor are they reticent about doing it in English. The students say the class is far more interesting--and useful--than the district’s typical ESL classes they have taken that stress only language drill and work sheet practice.

“She brings in foods from around the world for us to try, she has us learn about the (American) law and the news,” seventh-grader Sam Vorana said.

The students have also learned about health and related matters of more than passing interest to budding adolescents.

“We learn about different types of life,” said seventh-grader Ivan Garcia, struggling momentarily to express himself, “you know, as teen-agers, from being a child to being an adult.”

“We can practice and listen to English faster with Mrs. McCunney, and talk to the phone,” said seventh-grader Hue Huynh, referring to the homework help-line.

The ESL experiment at two heavily Latino and Indochinese schools--one class at Wilson and one at Mann Middle School, the district’s other East San Diego middle school--faces some daunting problems.

Some of the students in the classes who have lived in the United States for years have already heard the siren song of gang membership, or suffered the stigmatism of poverty, or have been kept back in low-level ESL classes rather than prodded more forcefully into the mainstream English curriculum, McCunney said.

The soft-spoken McCunney studies Vietnamese and in 1988 visited Vietnam in an effort to meet her students halfway in encouraging a mutual love of learning. She worries about whether she can give her charges a “level of comfort, a sense of independence and social awareness that (most) American kids take for granted.”

Her three-year, federally funded project is designed to boost her students’ understanding of English faster than regular ESL classes do, in large part by promoting what McCunney said might be called “a positive Americanization” approach. While the district applied for funding for separate Latino and Indochinese classes, it was approved only for Indochinese, although some Latino and Ethiopian students also take part.

“The real successes will be long-range,” said McCunney, noting that federal regulations that go along with funding require yearly standardized testing to measure language improvement.

“I do feel the students are more extroverted now (than in September). They are more comfortable with themselves, since many live very sheltered lives at home.

“At the beginning of the year, probably no one would call me for help, but now I get calls at home, sometimes about an assignment they don’t quite understand, mostly though for them to talk about their friends and other things.

“And I do feel that their speaking and writing will show improvements when tested later” this spring.

McCunney spends time after school shopping in the numerous mom-and-pop stores dotting the Wilson and Mann neighborhoods where she can informally meet parents of the students, most of whom are shy about coming to visit the classes. “But I know the kids talk about me to their parents because of feedback I’ve gotten when I’ve made home visits,” she said.

McCunney finds the students at Mann tend to be more jaded than those at Wilson because they have on average lived in the United States longer.

“I run the class there at a more structured, advanced level and (at times) it becomes more of a gang prevention effort, where we have a unit on drugs, on alcohol, on peer pressure,” she said.

“At Wilson, for most of the students it is their first chance to express themselves, their feelings, in an abstract, nonconcrete way in English” and as a result, there is more improvisation, she said.

Last week, as a way to learn about the American legal system, the students created situations where one neighbor complained about noise or robbery or assault against another. Then they wrote dialogues for the complaining neighbor and his attorney, and the defendant neighbor and his attorney.

After reading them to their classmates, they heard Tran Vu, an attorney in Vietnam and now a city schools teacher, describe actual cases he handled. As one measure of the problems plaguing their East San Diego neighborhood, the students asked Vu several questions about how he would handle assault and robbery crimes.

The students also speak positively about the field trips McCunney has arranged to UC San Diego, the Police Department, and one where she turned them loose on city buses for an hour to see how well they could negotiate their way to and from a particular spot.

They participated in a neighborhood project to clean up some of the trash in their community. And they have heard numerous speakers from different professions and ethnic groups talk about career possibilities.

“Tina’s incredibly resourceful,” said Tim Allen, the district’s coordinator of second-language programs. “We’re trying to deal with the kids as people (instead of) just emphasizing content,” where teachers hold up pictures of various post office functions, for example, or simply have students read passages without relating them to their environment.

“We’re trying to move more toward incorporating (ESL) in a civics-type course.”

In another example of new approaches being considered, the district is applying next week for an additional federal grant to help Latino immigrant students at San Diego High by offering them more useful English instruction, vocational training and more cultural encounters with their new society.