WOODLAND HILLS : Students From China Bridging Language Gap

They were shy, scared and barely spoke a word of English in October when they arrived at Los Angeles International Airport from China.

But after they studied English for five months at Hale Middle School in Woodland Hills, their language skills have improved markedly. And now, the youngest group of foreign exchange students between the United States and China can have conversations with their American peers during nutrition and lunch breaks.

And their teacher in Hale’s English as a Second Language program said they can understand basically everything that is said to them.

“They are able to communicate,” said teacher Judith Crespo. “In a faltering way, but they do communicate.”

One of the star students, William Wan, 12, said his English class is too easy and that learning Chinese was much more difficult for him.

William added that he wants to become proficient enough in English to attend UCLA when it comes time for college.

Aside from learning the language, the students have also gotten lessons in American culture.

Monday’s lesson was on fashion: The students focused on learning the names of clothing--T-shirt, blue jeans, baseball cap and hooded sweat shirt--all of which they were wearing.

Crespo said she has noticed that the children had purchased some distinctly American clothing lately, like denim shirts and flannels.

The lesson entailed forming sentences about clothing. “I like to wear blue jeans, but I don’t like to wear boots,” they would say out loud in class.

“And they are not as shy as they used to be,” Crespo said.

William said he had made some American friends recently by playing basketball at the school courts, a sport he had never played until he came to the U.S.

“Many students and many friendships,” William said of his social experience at Hale.

The Chinese youths make up the largest and youngest delegation from China to the United States. The entire group, all students at the Heroes School in Guangzhou, has been going to school at Hale and living in chaperoned apartments nearby.

Back in October, the exchange group was made up of 75 students between the ages of 11 and 14. Now, there are 65. One boy, Bin-Feng Sheng, 12, died when he was accidentally hit by a car while running across a busy street in November. Nine others opted to go back home to China within the last few months.

The original plan was that the youngsters would stay for only one semester, but the exchange program coordinators were able to extend their stay until the end of the school year.

Karen Stafford, Hale’s bilingual coordinator, said she and Christine Tung, the director of the Sino-U.S. Business and Technology Exchange, a private Trans-Pacific business company that helped arrange the exchange program, tried to get 10 more students from the Heroes School to join this group.

But the U.S. Consulate denied the children visas, Stafford said.

Next year, though, about 75 students from China are expected to continue the foreign exchange program.