The Global Classroom : Children Begin Language Immersion Programs in Kindergarten

Principal Stephen Martinez tiptoed into the Farragut Elementary School kindergarten classroom in Culver City, trying not to be noticed.

It didn’t work.

Hearing him, the students--whites, Latinos, African Americans and Asian Americans--jumped up, faced Martinez, bowed deeply, and greeted him in a singsong chorus with “ Ohayo Gozaimasu Martinez Sensei .”

Martinez grinned, bowed, and replied “Ohayo Gozaimasu.”

The formalities over, the children sat back on the floor, cross-legged in rows marked by strips of colored tape on the rug.

Red and blue construction paper folded into shapes of birds and elephants, called origami , were pinned to a corkboard. On a wall nearby was a clock with Japanese Kanji characters instead of Arabic numerals, and a photo of Japan’s royal family.

Martinez sat down to observe, and teacher Naomi Kawano resumed her lesson, reading aloud to her students in Japanese a tale about a dog and cat who become friends.

The children sat in rapt attention, appearing to understand her every word.

Farragut is one of about 150 elementary schools nationwide that “immerses” children in foreign languages ranging from Spanish and French to Japanese and Korean. The idea, say educators, is to start teaching second languages to kids when they are eager 5-year-olds, not when they’re 16--and less willing to learn.

And rather than taking a single language class that meets for an hour a day, students in immersion programs actually do course work--history, social studies, math--in a second language.

Such learning has taken root on the Westside, which is served by three of the 45 school districts statewide that have language immersion programs.

Culver City Unified launched the country’s first Spanish immersion program in 1971. Now the district has a K-5 Spanish immersion curriculum and a newly launched kindergarten through second-grade Japanese immersion program, which serve 300 students.

Los Angeles Unified has three Korean and four Spanish immersion programs in elementary schools, with one of the Spanish programs at Grand View Elementary in Mar Vista serving 146 students.

Santa Monica/Malibu Unified offers K-8 Spanish immersion courses and next fall plans to add ninth-grade Spanish-language courses in physical science, humanities and algebra to its foreign immersion track, which now serves 405 students.

The rationale offered for such programs is that Americans must learn to communicate in other tongues in an era of growing economic and cultural interdependence.

“We’re deficient in our collective knowledge of other languages and other cultures,” said Russell Campbell, a professor of linguistics at UCLA who helped design Culver City’s program 23 years ago. Language immersion, he says, produces “kids who can use other languages in the real world, and who can be a benefit to society.”

Immersion usually begins in kindergarten. In the early grades students are taught almost exclusively in a second language so that by second and third grade they are reading and writing in it.

In the Culver City and Santa Monica programs only 20 minutes a day is spent on English instruction in kindergarten, but that amount increases as students progress to higher grades.

Fourth- and fifth-graders at El Rincon Elementary in Culver City and Edison Elementary in Santa Monica spend half their school day learning in Spanish and half in English. Culver City students who make it through the K-5 Spanish immersion curriculum can go on to take a Spanish language arts course in middle school and an advanced Spanish language course at Culver City High.

Young children, though generally less inhibited than older students when learning a second language, still face hurdles in mastering another tongue. Learning to write the complicated Kanji alphabet--one of three Japanese alphabets--poses a special challenge.

“(It’s) a meticulous process,” said Kawano. “Their motor skills are not as developed yet, so they go through a process of repetition.”

But immersion veterans say their intensive early instruction made learning in another language far easier in higher grades.

Ayanna Bledsoe, an eighth-grader at John Adams Middle School in Santa Monica, says one of her toughest assignments recently was “no big deal,” thanks to the earlier immersion courses she took as a youngster.

“We had to read ‘Don Quixote,’ in Spanish,” said Bledsoe, 13, a native English speaker. “Then we had to do a book report in Spanish.”

She helps her younger sister, a fifth-grader at Edison Elementary, with her Spanish homework. And the pair use their new language for some extracurricular communicating at home. Nothing, Bledsoe says, beats dishing some chisme (gossip) in Spanish within earshot of their mother, who speaks only English.

Teachers in the Culver City and Santa Monica school districts say many immersion students approach foreign language programs as Bledsoe does--a challenge that is fun at the same time.

Initially, however, some parents worry that immersion classes might put their children at a disadvantage when it comes time to do English-language schoolwork.

For Diana Bulgatz, that concern proved short-lived. Bulgatz acknowledges she had some qualms when she enrolled her daughter, Heidi, in Culver City’s Spanish immersion program in 1974.

“My friends asked, ‘Aren’t you worried that it’s going to ruin her English?’ ” recalled Bulgatz. But she decided to try the program anyway.