The Perfect Match

He remembers his first year and a half in Orange County through a haze. Back then, Siping Han relied on hand gestures and a few basic words to communicate. He had no friends and was confident of only one thing: He understood nothing that was happening around him.

“It was like a dream” that made no sense, Siping said. He saw his new life here as one mysterious scene after another.

Siping had moved to the United States from China in 1988. Then 9, he was simply following his mother, who was a graduate student here. His command of the English language on arrival amounted solely to the word “hello.”

The schoolmates who knew him then as he struggled to speak are stunned to hear how well he has mastered the language.

In December, at age 16, he received a perfect score of 800 on the verbal section of the SAT college admissions test.

His immersion in the English language and the remarkable influence of one teacher, he believes, made possible the dramatic accomplishment.

Siping also did extremely well on the math section of the test: He missed only one question--realizing the correct answer as he walked out of the testing room door.

His scores place him in a small group of students known for their remarkable ability to learn.

“It’s definitely something to be proud of,” said Jeffrey Penn of the College Board, which produces the test. When considering the language handicap Siping started with, Penn added, his learning ability is even more pronounced.

Of the 1 million high school seniors who took the SAT in 1994, only 32 students got every answer right on both portions of the test, administrators said.

Siping and his mother credit the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District and a slew of dedicated teachers with his success.

But there is one teacher in particular they love for bridging the daunting divide between Siping’s incommunicado existence and his current success.

The teacher, Ann Jones, has been teaching fifth- and sixth-graders at Ruby Drive Elementary School in Placentia for the past 17 years. Her classroom is still much like it was in September 1989, when Siping met her. Cramped with small desks and chairs and decorated with the construction-paper hearts from her pupils and posters lauding the virtues of reading and writing, it was there that Siping became engaged with the English language.

He spent a lot of time in her class because his mother, Weiping Kong, refused to allow him to stay in special classes for non-English speakers.

Kong was convinced that English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) classes--taught in addition to regular classes in English--would slow her son down. As a teacher herself, she had seen very intelligent students remain dependent on ESL classes all the way through college. Those students rarely seemed to venture into the English-speaking world, she said.

Kong’s opinion, based on her own study of language acquisition, is that--in general--ESL teachers are too sympathetic to those students’ plight and hold them to different standards.

“For instance, they might grade a paper by its ideas and not its grammar. I think errors are not always corrected,” Kong said.

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That is how Siping remembers his first few months in the ESL program. Surrounded by pupils in his same predicament, he said, he could get by with an amalgam of basic English words, improvised sign language and rapidly drawn pictures.

He was fairly comfortable in that boat, even though, he added, “we all stayed about the same level.”

His mother was relatively fluent in English, but she didn’t have time to help him. Besides, at home she wanted to use Chinese exclusively so he wouldn’t lose his ability to speak the language. Everything the family did, read and ate was--and to this day is--in Chinese.

Kong asked the principal at Ruby Drive Elementary School to try an immersion method, keeping her son out of the special classes. The principal agreed.

Bonnie Devine of the school’s ESL program--but who was not Siping’s ESL teacher--said she could understand Kong’s intent, since she too tries to get pupils as involved as possible in their regular classes and conversations with classmates.

But she also sees benefits in the ESL class for many youngsters. The pupils are often afraid of embarrassing themselves in front of their fluent classmates, and the ESL room provides a “safe place” for them to practice communicating in English.

For Siping, it was Jones’ fifth-grade class that became the place to learn. There, Jones brought the English language to life for him.

From a tall chair in her classroom, Jones would read to the class every day, her voice acting out the book’s plot. She roared when the dialogue was angry and sounded plaintive when words were sad.

At times, Jones was so moved by the material she actually cried, one of her former pupils, Jenny Guo, recalled.

“We all looked at each other and said, ‘Wow, she’s crying,’ ” Guo said.

Jones’ intent was to help all of her pupils “pick up vocabulary and the rhythm of the language,” she said. With almost 30 years of teaching experience, and as many classes in education as well as her experience as a fellow in UCI’s writing program, she firmly believed in long-term value of reading and writing to expand a command of the language.

As did many of her pupils, Siping developed a fascination with books from watching her. In a little over a year, he went from being unable to read a single chapter to reading a book a day.

“She really encouraged us,” Siping said. She asked pupils to read 20 minutes a day in school as well as at home. She provided them with books that ranged from nursery rhymes to C.S. Lewis books.

Occasionally, she let pupils bring in pillows and sleeping bags so they would feel more comfortable reading. And she asked them to write down and tell each other what they liked about the books they read.

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In her sixth-grade class today, she takes the same approach, and her pupils seem to love reading books and watching her. With a variety of paperbacks stacked on their desks, they quietly listened as Jones read aloud the story of a fictional prehistoric man. When she finished reading, they eagerly asked and answered questions about the book.

She still offers an incentive of dinner out to push youngsters to read different genres of work, from poetry to fables to fairy tales. In Siping’s case, she added another category: nursery rhymes.

“There are a lot of references to nursery rhymes in everyday conversation,” which she wanted him to be able to understand, she said.

She has saved samples of his writing to show other teachers “a model of what second-language students can do.”

“It’s just unbelievable what he accomplished” in the two years she knew him. The teachers who have seen his work “are in awe,” she said.

His former classmates are as well. When they stop by to visit, “I mention how well Siping is doing. They are blown over. It’s a joy” for them to see his progress, she said.

Siping, now a junior at Esperanza High School in Anaheim, said practicing on old examples of the SAT also helped him prepare for the test. He is now sending away for applications to Caltech, UCLA and Stanford.

Though he still loves to read and write, he plans to study physics.

The field, he says, will give him an infinite number of challenges. And give him the opportunity to experience the “triumphant feeling” he gets when he masters something new.

Such as English.