COLUMN ONE : Three Rs and an S--for Spanish : Elementary schools across the U.S. are adding foreign languages to regular studies. Parents want to give their children equal footing with those in Europe and Japan.

Let’s all join 9-year-old Nick Carson and his fellow third-graders at Horace Mann elementary school as they practice their new song, complete with sound effects. Ready?

Cuando la noche llego (clap-clap),

y con su manto de azul (clap-clap),

el blanco rancho cubrio (clap-clap)

y alegre el baile empezo (clap-clap).

For the record, that’s an old Mexican classic called “Las Chiapanecas.” Considering who’s learning it, some might also call it revolutionary.

Come the turn of the century, what American city could boast one of the country’s highest proportions of bilingual youngsters: Los Angeles? San Diego? Try Wichita, smack-dab in the middle of the nation’s broad, conservative and heavily Anglo heartland.

Nick and his classmates are already taking Spanish at a magnet school. But, starting next fall, school officials hope to embark on an ambitious decade-long plan to weave instruction in the Western Hemisphere’s “other” major language into the regular daily curriculum for all third-, fourth- and fifth-graders in the city’s 70 elementary schools.

Though final approval is still pending before the local school board, the Wichita plan is at the vanguard of a widening national focus on early foreign language training. It would elevate Spanish instruction to the level of math, geography, social studies and the other old standbys that have been taught to the nation’s youngest schoolchildren for decades.

“The best time to learn a foreign language is when you’re young,” explained Wichita school Supt. Stuart Berger. “. . . We’re so chauvinistic in this country. We need to give kids an idea early on that there are other languages spoken. And any time you study a foreign language there are lots of good lessons that will help in the study of English as well.”

Even while the budget noose tightens around many schools, a growing number of states and local districts are stressing the need to develop language skills in their youngest students. “It’s happening all over the place and it’s happening in funny places,” said David Edwards, executive director of the Joint National Committee for Languages in Washington. Though precise figures are hard to come by, Edwards estimated that 17% of public elementary schools now offer some form of foreign language instruction, but only about 5% of elementary students actually take advantage of it. That could be changing soon.

North Carolina has already begun phasing in a program that by 1995 would require foreign language classes for all children in grades kindergarten through five. Louisiana, Arizona and Oklahoma have mandated similar plans and other states are considering them. California, however, is not.

California has a huge immigrant population base and a smattering of innovative, experimental foreign language programs in selected elementary schools in Los Angeles, Culver City, Orange County, San Diego and other locations. Still, experts say financial concerns, a lack of qualified teachers and even political backlash to anything that would appear to some critics to subvert the pre-eminence of English could freeze most California schools out of the broader instructional trend.

“I don’t think it’s even on the horizon,” said Fred Dobb, who oversees foreign language programs for the California Department of Education. “We have a lot of good programs at the elementary level but it’s not a widespread phenomenon.”

Foreign language instruction in America’s public schools is hardly new. But until recently, it has largely been the province of high schools and sometimes middle schools, and participation has usually been optional. Rarely has it been offered at the elementary school level, except to select, highly motivated groups in special magnet or “immersion” schools where most courses are taught in Spanish, French, German or some other tongue.

Americans are the developed world’s most notorious linguistic stumblebums, as a group largely unable or unwilling to discern poulet from pescado . (French for chicken, Spanish for fish.) If someone who speaks two languages is bilingual, the old joke goes, what do you call someone who speaks only one language? An American.

Experts say self-interest is beginning to change all that. Helena Curtain, the author of a highly influential book touting the benefits of early language training, said American parents have begun to clamor for reform because they fear that their children will lag behind Japanese and European youngsters, who routinely are taught second and even third languages at very young ages.

“That’s the No. 1 reason behind all this, economic interdependence and global interdependence,” explained Curtain, a foreign language curriculum specialist with the Milwaukee public schools. “They want their kids to be able to communicate in an international world.”

And the reason for starting earlier than has been traditional? It’s simply easier to teach a foreign language to younger children than older ones, who tend to be more inhibited.

“They’re definitely little sponges,” explained Nancy Rhodes, a school curriculum specialist with the Center for Applied Linguistics, a Washington-based research organization. “ . . . Language training is making mistakes. When you’re older, who likes to be sitting there with 20 other people making a fool of yourself?”

That’s exactly how Reni Saxon of Wichita felt when she took Spanish classes in high school years ago. As a consequence, Saxon says, she did not learn very much. But her children, 9-year-old Mikey Butler and 11-year-old Maryalice Butler, both students at Horace Mann, seem to think that speaking a language other than English is great fun.

“They talk Spanish together; they sing songs in Spanish around the house,” Saxon said, beaming. “They’ll sing them for anybody at the drop of a hat. I’m going down the aisles in the grocery store and Mikey’s behind me singing a song in Spanish as we go along.”

But the best thing about having her children, especially Mikey, learn Spanish is that it seems to have transformed them into something more than just average students, Saxon said. “This year, in particular, he’s doing better in all subjects than he’s done before,” she said.

Indeed, there is considerable research pointing to a spillover effect of early language instruction, said Gerard Touissant, supervisor of the second-language studies section of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. Studies in the United States and Canada show that children with substantial foreign language training routinely outscore their peers on achievement tests, Touissant explained.

For example, students with four or five years of foreign language instruction average more than 100 points better than their peers on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests used as entrance exams by many major universities, Touissant said. A 1985 Louisiana study of more than 13,000 elementary school students showed similar results.

Third-, fourth- and fifth-graders who had taken second language studies in that state’s public schools scored significantly higher than other students on a standard test designed to measure their English reading and grammar skills. Fifth-graders with foreign language training also seemed to do better in standardized math tests than youngsters who had no language training.

“Children who study a foreign language increase their chances of performing better in all subject areas because they become more verbal, and verbal ability is a very strong predictor of performance in academics,” Touissant said.

Citing growing foreign investment in North Carolina, state lawmakers in 1985 approved the nation’s most sweeping foreign language instruction mandate. By 1995, school systems will be required to offer second-language studies to every elementary and secondary school pupil in the state, a population that now totals 1.25 million. Instruction will be required for children in grades kindergarten through five. For older children, it will be optional.

Touissant said most districts have already initiated programs from kindergarten to third grade. About 75% to 80% of the schools are teaching Spanish, and most of the rest have opted for French.

Wichita is under no such legislative mandate. But officials here say they see a heightened emphasis on foreign language instruction as a mechanism to broaden horizons for their 47,000 students. “It’s an acknowledgement in the district that this world is not going to get any more white and middle class than it already is,” said Armida Haight, the Spanish instructor at Horace Mann.

Even the demographics of central Kansas are beginning to change. The home to major military facilities and the nation’s center of light aircraft manufacturing, Wichita boasts a population of 300,000. In the schools, at least 17% of the students are black, another 10% Latino and about 5% of Asian ethnicity.

Kathleen Mellor, foreign language coordinator for the Wichita school system, said the district settled on Spanish as its primary medium of instruction for two very practical reasons--students are more likely to get some everyday use out of Spanish, and the supply of qualified teachers is more plentiful than for other languages.

More plentiful, but not still not plentiful enough. Officials say they hope ultimately to give every elementary school student about 30 minutes a day of Spanish instruction. It will take years to find or train enough teachers to meet that goal, so plans call for phasing the curriculum in slowly by introducing it to only six new schools a year.

Louisiana, where state law requires daily foreign language classes for 80,000 youngsters in the fourth through eighth grades, has similar problems. “We can’t find the teachers,” complained Perry Waguespack, director of the bureau of academic support for the Louisiana Board of Education.

Legal requirements notwithstanding, Waguespack said more than half of fourth- and fifth-grade classes, nearly 80% of sixth-grade classes and more than 90% of seventh- and eighth-grade classes have yet to offer foreign language instruction. The reason: lack of teachers. What’s more, about 40% of those who are teaching foreign languages at the elementary level in Louisiana had to be imported from abroad--primarily from Belgium, France and Canada--largely to satisfy a heavy demand for French.

Foreign language mandates get a lukewarm reception from Ronald Saunders, executive director of U.S. English, a Washington-based group that has lobbied to make English the nation’s official language. The more fluent Americans become in other languages, the better, Saunders agreed. But he questioned whether scarce school resources should not first be spent on the meat and potatoes of language needs in the United States.

“Our concern is that we’ve got hundreds of thousands of kids who are here in our public schools in an English language-speaking country who are being failed and not being provided instruction sufficient to allow them to really become proficient in English,” Saunders argued.

Even some outspoken advocates of early language training question the value of mandating broad-based programs such as those in North Carolina or Louisiana if schools cannot find enough help or money to run them. “To make it mandatory without sufficient funds, without the teachers, I think we’re just putting ourselves in jeopardy,” said Madeline Ehrlich of Culver City, founder of Advocates for Language Learning, a nationwide lobbying group.

Community enthusiasm will fade quickly if the quality of instruction is poor and children do not seem to be getting much out of it,” Ehrlich warned. “You have to be very careful. This happened in the (years) after Sputnik. Everybody started saying: ‘Oh yeah, we’ve got to learn a second language.’ . . . It didn’t last. Why? Because I don’t think there was the quality of the product that was there, so people didn’t continue to support it.”

Times researcher Tracy Shryer contributed to this story.