Language Comes Alive : Unique School District Program Uses Songs, Cooking Lessons and Field Trips to Help Teach English to Immigrant Students

Several immigrant students in a Gardena High School classroom are working on an English lesson. Their assignment: assemble a cardboard castle.

While the students follow English instructions to fashion turrets and piece together walls, the conversation strays from how peculiar sounding are words such as moat and turret to talk of their own countries--Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador--and the difficulty of adjusting to the United States.

It is Esmi De Leon’s) turn to talk. Speaking in Spanish, he describes how in the Guatemalan night sky, the full moon shines so clear and close that stargazers can make out the sketch of a huge tree spreading out its branches from the moon’s center to its edge.

“I know it sounds funny, but it’s true,” said De Leon, a 14-year-old who moved to Gardena last November. “And with the tree in the middle there, it looks almost like a coin shining in the sky.”

“Here,” he says, with an air of disappointment, “it is just white.”

No one makes fun of De Leon’s description of the moon. The other students agree with the larger point: that everything is different from what they are used to--not just the language or the food or the way people dress. But everything.

And the biggest hurdle is learning to speak English.

Toward that end, De Leon and 80 other immigrant students at Gardena High School are spending the summer in a type of English summer camp where they sing songs, bake cakes and even go to McDonald’s--activities that are anything but traditional when it comes to learning foreign languages.

The students are there to practice speaking English, but the program’s scope is more than just holding creative vocabulary lessons. The directors and teachers hope that through first-hand experience with the language, in activities and field trips, students will become more comfortable and confident in their new community.

The federal Emergency Immigrant Education Assistance Program, funded by Congress in 1984 and begun in Los Angeles a year later, is meant to help states with large immigrant populations supplement classroom education and give new arrivals the language and cultural skills that are not typically taught in the classroom. To be eligible for the program, students must be born outside the United States and not have attended school here for more than three years.

Within the vast Los Angeles Unified School District, the Gardena program is touted as one of the best, mainly because of teachers Linda Ritchie-Daza and Ayako Motoyasu.

“There are many excellent teachers doing wonderful things with this program all over,” said Lila Silvern, head of the school district’s program. “But the teachers at Gardena are some of the most experienced and creative ones we have.”

During the summer, students work solely on speaking English, learning it through field trips to museums, cooking classes, arts and crafts and tours of the city police and fire departments. Classes run from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., and students participate voluntarily.

The overwhelming majority of students--95%--are Latino, a few are Asian and from the Pacific Rim. Because most do not yet speak English well enough to hold extended conversations, students often speak in their native languages. Still, they say, the program does boost their English.

“It definitely serves to teach you English, especially when we take trips and go to museums, or when we do cooking classes,” said Karla Abogabir,14, from Honduras. “When you do things with your hand, then you remember the words, like frosting or sifter .”

School officials say that cooking meals or singing songs helps the students learn everyday English words. But as important are the lessons in American culture.

Los Angeles offers the classes at 66 middle schools and high schools and 32 elementary schools. The program is also offered during vacation breaks. A total of 14,000 students participate. This summer, about 5,000 students are taking the classes.

To be eligible to teach the classes, teachers are asked to attend several workshops a year and must use vacation days to go to field trip sites before they take the students. In return, teachers in the program are given almost complete creative freedom in the classroom.

The idea for teaching English through cooking lessons came from Banning High School teacher Frank Silvino, and it is now a popular activity at many schools.

Likewise, a project created by Motoyasu and Ritchie-Daza last year--a scale model of Gardena--has been emulated by teachers at other schools.

The model, which is in the program office in Bel-Air as an example of outstanding work by both students and teachers, includes a freeway, police and fire departments, schools and houses. Girls even crocheted tiny curtains for the windows, and the basketball courts have tiny nets. Each item in a project teaches a nuance of English and American culture, Ritchie-Daza said.

Ritchie-Daza and Motoyasu teach bilingual education during the year and say they have an affinity for students who are new to the United States.

“Frankly, I don’t really like teaching the regular kids,” Motoyasu said. “These kids are really motivated and they’re here because they want to learn. And they’re grateful for whatever you give them or whatever you teach them--they haven’t learned to be American yet,” she said with a shrug.

Among the 639,687 students in the Los Angeles school district, two out of every three come from homes where a language other than English is spoken. About 67,000 have lived in the United States less than three years. Of those, only 18% speak fluent English.

In spite of the language barrier, students in Gardena’s classes routinely say they are surprised at how much easier education is here than in their native countries.

“Where I went to school in Mexico, it was very serious and there was absolutely no playing around like there is here,” said Sadie Ortiz, a student aide in the class. “You had to stand up when giving an answer, and then you had to take a test to go on to the next grade. If you didn’t pass the test you couldn’t go to the next level.”

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Among the favorite lessons in the summer school are the cooking classes.

“Not only does it give us the chance to go through vocabulary like ‘This is a spoon, this is a carton of salt,’ but it also breaks down some cultural barriers in terms of men doing some cooking,” Ritchie-Daza said.

Recently, the class--divided into two groups of 40 students--baked and frosted birthday cakes.

The first group, baking rectangular, square and heart-shaped yellow cakes, navigated its way through English measurements, ingredients and temperatures. The second group made the frosting of confectioners’ sugar, butter, milk, vanilla and salt, following Ritchie-Daza’s instructions from the front of the classroom.

“Is this butter or margarine?” she asked.

“How much is one stick?” she continued.

“How much of it are you going to use?”

As Ritchie-Daza speaks, hip-hop music blasts from a radio in one corner while throughout the room, boys and girls flirt with each other. Others pop out of their seats to admire the freshly baked cakes and poke at their sponginess.

Ritchie-Daza finally blows a whistle. Then she holds up a slim bottle of flavoring and asks them what it is.

“Vanilla,” the class answers in unison. No one uses the Spanish pronunciation for ll (which is y ) and even the short i --a sound that does not exist in Spanish--is clear.

“Oh, excellent pronunciation!” Ritchie-Daza says, and teaches the words spatula and electric mixer as the students use each item.

Gregarious and outgoing, Karla moves to a table full of boys to direct their efforts. But the boys need no help.

“I cook at home,” said Juan Ochoa, 16.

“No! You cook? I don’t believe it. Of course you don’t cook,” Karla said.

“I do too. I make beans and tortillas and tacos,” said Juan.

The cooking class leads to good-natured ribbing about the variety of names for food in Latino countries.

While pavo is a generic Spanish word for turkey, guajolote is more common in Mexico and chompipe is accepted in El Salvador. Corn is called maiz in some countries, but when it’s cooked, it’s called choclos in others. Avocados are paltas in some places and aguacates in others. To some, a chile is a cool green bell pepper, not a jalapeno.

“I’ve never lived any place where there were so many different cultures and different kinds of people--and that’s just with Latinos,” said Sandra Arias, a 14-year-old from Mexico.

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If it takes work for people from the various Latino cultures to communicate, program officials say, it can be equally difficult for people new to teaching students with limited English to Get their message across.

Manuel Diaz, an assistant program director, goes to museums and other sites to show workers how they can teach a lesson entirely in English so the students will still understand them.

“For example, at Malibu Lagoon, first I gave them a small lesson in Spanish, and I spoke at a normal rate,” Diaz said. “They could see that even though they know the material I’m talking about, they didn’t understand what I was saying.

“Then I did it at a slower rate, still in Spanish, using drawings and hand motions and I repeated words again and again. Then they could understand.”

When the students took a field trip to Malibu Lagoon, one docent--using exaggerated hand gestures and dead fish for props--taught students how the fish survive at different levels of the lagoon.

To demonstrate how fish use their gills, she flapped her arms and explains that plankton filter through and get stuck on the openings.

“And how do they eat that plankton? They stick out their tongues,” she said, sticking out her own, “And lick it off! Yum!” The Gardena students laugh, but she has made her point.

Leading another group of students to the lagoon’s edge, naturalist Oscar Ortiz of the Topanga Resource Conservation District waded into the foamy waters and turned to face the group. From there he explained that fresh and salt water mix in the lagoon, creating optimum conditions for many types of young fish.

First, he told them that the lagoon once belonged to the Chumash tribe, which lived there for 10,000 years before Europeans arrived. Then the students helped him collect a sample of water and test it for pollution. It showed he was probably standing in water contaminated with a small percentage of human waste. The whole group winced.

“When you see white foam on the water, that’s human waste,” Ortiz said.

They walked behind Ortiz, eating plants as he pointed them out--first licorice-tasting tubes of fennel, then little flowers of mustard. He stopped to point out rabbit footprints.

Footprints was a new word for some. “You put shoes on the rabbits?” one surprised student asked. Ortiz explained that he meant tracks.

Then he taught them how the sea anemone can eject its stomach if food becomes scarce, growing it back when food returns. And how sea urchins need to eat constantly because they have no stomach at all. Sea stars, Ortiz said while holding up a dead one, latch onto their prey and dissolve them with digestive fluid secreted from their stomachs. He gave the lesson in English, but occasionally would answer their questions in Spanish.

Before students boarded the bus back to Gardena, Ortiz had them pick up a handful of golden, glistening sand and look at it under a magnifying glass. Under the magnifying glass, the sand is not golden but a mixture of red pieces of shell, black bits of iron, crystal-looking quartz and many other colors.

“See, it’s not really one color at all,” Ortiz says.

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In the coming days, teachers Motoyasu and Ritchie-Daza will lead the students on other outings.

They will visit a nearby MacDonald’s, where they will learn how a restaurant functions. They will tour the Gardena post office to see the mail system. Already they have been to the Gardena Library to apply for cards and to the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum for lessons in genealogy and life in the Old West.

Later this summer, the students will go to the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance.

“The trips are invaluable in terms of showing them how much they have in common with people they’ve never met before or maybe even heard about,” Ritchie-Daza said.

They also remind students, she said, of something you don’t need a classroom to learn:

“That people from all different kinds of places really aren’t all that different.”