Applied Linguistics : For Immigrant Students, Bilingual Program Is a Path to Success

Pavel Markovsky felt incredibly alone.

Like a child living out some fantastic dream, he walked shyly through a crowded Reseda High School hallway jammed with swarthy and blond-headed boys hugging their girlfriends and high-fiving cronies, all pushing their way brusquely past.

This was Ground Zero for the Russian-born teen, the dreaded first day as an outsider at a new high school. But for Markovsky, the almost unendurable torture of this first morning didn’t stop there. It wasn’t just the faces that were new, or the classes or even the eye-popping, rap-music-inspired American teen-age culture.

It was the seemingly insurmountable language barrier: Pavel mouthed only a few halting English phrases. His family had arrived from the Ukraine just three weeks ago and now this awkward-looking 15-year-old was set to begin the academic and linguistic odyssey of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s bilingual education program.

Pavel blinked his eyes. “It’s very frustrating,’ he said in faltering English, sneaking a glance at the passing students around him. “ Very frustrating.”

With any luck, between two and six years from now, teachers and administrators hope Pavel will turn out like David Guillen, a 17-year-old from Guatemala. Or Kira Krupovlyanskaya, a teen from Uzbekistan in the former Soviet Union. Or young Claudia Medina from El Salvador. None could speak a word of English when they arrived from their homelands a few years ago.

Today, all three are graduates of the district’s controversial bilingual education program, and all are well-adjusted, nearly straight-A students considering colleges and careers.

For years, classes such as math and science have been taught in a student’s native tongue, while the student also took English courses. This is a method that detractors say should be abandoned in favor of full immersion in English-only classes.

As bilingual education continues to be a lightning rod for debate, thousands of students across Los Angeles are transferring out of the program at a faster rate than ever, a recent school district report said.

The study showed English acquisition of L.A. Unified’s non-native speakers has improved markedly over the last year, even as the number of such pupils ballooned to more than 292,000 districtwide. In the 1994-95 school year, 24,000 students were transferred out of the bilingual program and into mainstream classes, a 2% rise over the year before.

Still, for many of these impressionable foreign-born teens, the passage through the bilingual program is about far more than just learning English. It gives students the feeling of not fitting in at precisely the time in their lives when not standing out is an emotional imperative.

When they ultimately cross that linguistic border into English-only classes, many face cruel laughter and mimicry as they mispronounce words while reading aloud. They face indecisive moments of knowing an answer but not raising their hand solely because they are unsure of their English.

For others, graduating from the program is a liberation from slow-moving classes shared with newcomers who speak one of 37 foreign languages at Reseda--students with whom they share little other than an inability to speak textbook English.

There are also perils in entering the mainstream waters of the Southern California high school. “Most of what I remember are the faces of other students in class looking at me like I was dumb,” said Guillen, who also speaks French and Russian and plans to become a doctor.

“They got mad when you didn’t understand,” he said. “Back then, I didn’t know I could learn a language so easily. I liked English. And I learned it fast.”

But on this day, Pavel Markovsky was in no mood to ponder what will certainly be the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of acquiring English as a second language.

During his first day at school, he sat stiffly and alone at a table in the school’s bilingual office, taking tests to determine his Russian and English comprehension.

The exams were administered by 19-year-old Claudia Romero, a Reseda graduate-turned teacher’s assistant, who just six years ago sat in the very same chair as Pavel, taking the same tests, as a new arrival from Mexico.

“I know how he feels--all alone,” she said, glancing over at Pavel with a look of empathy. “I remember this day all too well. All you want to do is go home. But it gets better. He just doesn’t know that right now.”

*

David Guillen was a 1990s version of an 1890s immigrant. He was a 15-year-old Central American who arrived with his mother and four sisters--as he recalls--a young sponge ready to absorb his new culture. His family moved into a house across the street from Reseda High and Guillen remembers gazing over at the campus with curiosity, excitement. And fear.

He liked school. But his English boiled down to one word: Hello.

The next day he was attending classes in which his native Spanish was spoken in complicated classes such as math and science. But he was also taking classes in English as a second language--the start of a program that would slowly meld his fledgling English into his high school course work.

In successive semesters Guillen and others would begin taking courses taught in so-called sheltered English, where teachers painstakingly pursued lessons using hand motions and charts. Finally, depending on their ability, motivation and reinforcement from home, students like Guillen must pass a final battery of exams before graduating from the program.

But for newcomer Guillen, those tests seemed light years away on those first days. He walked the halls hearing a melodic new language that sounded like a combination of French and Spanish. But the words didn’t make sense.

There he was in his physical education class, following instructions in a language that might as well have been Martian. “You just went along with what the other kids were doing,” he recalled. “If you were lucky, someone who spoke Spanish would translate for you.”

Kira Krupovlyanskaya wasn’t so lucky: Unlike Guillen, she didn’t have the luxury of hundreds of fellow students who spoke her native language. Almost nobody spoke Russian.

On her first day, as she sat glumly in the bilingual office, an understanding teacher produced one fellow student who spoke her language. “I remember thinking ‘Yes! Russian!’ It was so comforting to hear. I had this image of being totally alone in the classroom with everyone speaking a language I couldn’t understand.”

Ironically, students and teachers say, having a wealth of other students around who speak their native tongue makes it harder on newcomers to buckle down on their English.

“It’s easier if there is no one around who speaks your language. That way you’re forced to speak English,” Guillen recalled. “For me, it was too easy to lapse into my Spanish. Outside my English classes, I could have spoken Spanish all the time if I wanted to.”

While neither his mother nor his four sisters spoke English, Guillen found ways to immerse himself in his new second language. After school, he walked his neighborhood reading street signs, picking up comic books, flyers--anything written in English. Using a dogeared dictionary, he translated copious lists of words he couldn’t understand.

Soon he began noticing things: Why did English-speaking kids always say ‘OK’ at the end of every sentence? And how could he ever learn all the idioms, phrases like ‘Just kidding.’ How could something be ‘pretty ugly?’ Why did people drive on parkways and park on driveways?

Krupovlyanskaya too, struggled with the language at first. She got some help from the handful of other Russian-speaking students. But at home with her homework, she was all alone. She watched TV after school for English pointers.

Later, she got a part-time job at a Pizza Hut, practicing her English comprehension by taking orders over the telephone. Still, she found herself translating all the instructions on algebra homework into Russian before she could even begin to work on the problems.

“It wasn’t a matter of just speaking, I could say words,” recalled the teen-ager with shoulder-length blond hair, blue jeans and turquoise earrings, who wants to be a stockbroker. “It was putting thoughts together into sentences, being able to say what was on my mind.”

Kira had extra motivation: Her parents both gave up good-paying jobs back home in Russia so she could have the advantages of an American education. “I knew it was my obligation to do well, to repay them,” she said. “I knew I had to study in order to be somebody.”

Guillen and Krupovlyanskaya each sailed through the bilingual program in two years. It took Claudia Medina twice as long. But there was a time when she questioned the validity of mastering her second language.

“During my second year in the bilingual program, my mother began asking me ‘Why don’t you speak more English?’ I told her that it was too hard for me. I felt so stupid when I tried. All the while, I was asking myself ‘Why do I have to speak English in the first place when Spanish is my first language?’ ”

Even after completing the bilingual program, her work wasn’t over. Medina often found herself reluctant to raise her hand even when she knew the answers to questions for fear the teachers would not understand her accented English.

And then there were the English-speaking students to deal with: Medina often stumbled while reading aloud in class--too busy glancing ahead for words she might mispronounce. When she did, the reaction was often the same--snickering. Even from U.S-born Latinos.

“I’d get this lump in my throat,” she said. “When I get nervous, I can’t talk English.”

Guillen also heard the laughs. “Sometimes it got to you. When you don’t know how to speak the language, your self-esteem starts to go. It happens to lots of immigrants. Kids who were bullies in their own countries change when they come here. They have less self-esteem.”

*

Krupovlyanskaya’s reaction was different: Let them laugh. She knew who she was and what she was trying to accomplish. But like the others, she found her life became easier as she slowly melted into the world of English-speaking students, making new friends, maintaining old ones.

“Just like anything else, you get used to it,” Kira said of her new academic life among native English speakers. “You know what you have to do and you do it.”

Now Krupovlyanskaya and the others find themselves helping newcomers survive their first days in the English-speaking world. And for Kira, sometimes there’s some doubt about whether it’s Russian or English that’s her second language.

“Now and then, I’ll even forget Russian words,” she said. “It’s a strange thing, but sometimes it’s easier to explain things in English than Russian. And I never dreamed that would happen.”