Teaching the Silent Student

Jesy Moreno started school last fall, a lucky recipient of one of the limited public preschool spots in Los Angeles. But one thing immediately set the small boy apart from most of his classmates: At age 4 1/2, Jesy hardly spoke.

He could utter a few words--mostly names of family members--and he understood some of what was said to him. But carrying on a conversation was impossible, and he could not follow the simplest instructions.

There are thousands of youngsters like Jesy in Southern California--children who are not mentally retarded yet enter school lacking rudimentary communication skills.

They are called “non-nons” by the Los Angeles Unified School District--nonverbal in both English and in their native language. More than 6,800 students entering preschool, kindergarten and first grade scored at the “non-non” level last year. The volume surprised administrators of the 650,000-student district, who learned the scope of the problem only after a computer analysis of individual school tallies was requested by The Times.

The number of incoming non-nons has risen about 7% from two years ago, posing daunting problems for the already overburdened system.

Expressed simply: The less children speak, the more limited their comprehension and vocabulary and the harder it is for them to learn to read and write, not to mention navigate the social complexities of school.

Even now, after a year of concentrated effort by his teachers at Fenton Avenue Elementary in Lake View Terrace, Jesy cannot count to 10 or name the colors in the classroom’s crayon box. When another boy stole the wheels from a truck he had built, Jesy could not find the words to tell the teacher what had happened.

“Tell me, Jesy, what’s wrong?” Maria Dolinsky asked in Spanish, crouching to his level and over-enunciating her words, a practice everyone in the classroom follows with him.

“Ah, ah, toda llanta,” he answered haltingly. Um, um, all tire.

Although non-nons have never been studied formally, educators across the nation say students with similar problems are arriving at schools in other large urban areas--including Miami, Chicago and New York--as well as in smaller districts along the Mexican border.

They characterize children like Jesy as the extreme of a more commonly recognized decline in early language development, which they blame on a combination of problems related to poverty: family illiteracy, poor prenatal care, malnutrition, neglect and sometimes abuse.

They acknowledge that the size of the phenomenon remains unknown. More than 8% of students entering Los Angeles Unified preschool, kindergarten and first grade tested as nonverbal last year. There undoubtedly were more because the language assessment that identified them is given only to non-English speakers, since it is intended to determine whether students need bilingual education.

Observers believe the problem may be more severe among immigrant children, who face language confusion and other obstacles.

“You sometimes also have the double jeopardy of parents trying to teach them in English when they don’t speak it well. Those parents limit their conversation and the topics they speak about with their kids,” said Mercedes Toural, director of bilingual programs in Dade County, Fla., where individual schools are dealing with nonverbal youngsters but do not report their numbers to the district.

Teachers who have worked with non-nons believe the triggers often are less deliberate: The students tend to live in multifamily households, where making sure children are seen and not heard is a matter of courtesy if not sanity. No adults converse with them at the dinner table or read them books at bedtime. No one is building on whatever vocabulary they absorb from overhearing conversations, communicating with siblings and watching television.

“The problem is they have struggling parents who do not talk to them very much,” Dolinsky said. “They have the language in their brains, but they haven’t been able to share it.”

Some linguists doubt that being ignored is enough to seriously hinder speech development, which many consider a natural process that only can be thwarted by brain damage, a speech impediment or a learning disability.

But others open that theoretical door a crack, or more.

In pioneering research on language development published in 1992, psychologist Janellen Huttenlocher, a University of Chicago professor, found a wide verbal chasm between infants whose mothers spoke to them a lot and those whose mothers were less talkative. Huttenlocher chose only educated, middle-class mothers, she said, so the results could not be discounted as simply a measure of poor parent literacy or low socioeconomic status--factors, she said, that would widen the gap.

Huttenlocher called Los Angeles’ nonverbal tally “a huge number and very disturbing--they are seeing the very extreme.”

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The challenge facing urban districts is to identify children like Jesy and intervene before they are channeled into special-education classes for youngsters with emotional or learning disabilities. Too often, Huttenlocher said, schools fail to recognize “the distinction between kids who have difficulty learning and kids who haven’t been given anything to learn.”

At his house blocks from school, Jesy, his parents and his three siblings share space with two couples. In the afternoons, his mother baby-sits while his father works two jobs--cleaning floors in a nursing home and doing prep work in a restaurant. There is not much time to talk with Jesy.

“I don’t know much myself, but I know some letters and numbers. . . . I tell him, ‘Show me the seven,’ things like that,’ ” said his mother, Rosa Moreno, who came from rural El Salvador eight years ago.

Inside the sparsely furnished house, there is not a single book. The living room is dominated by a huge console TV, which Jesy turns on immediately when he arrives after school. He watches English-language cartoons with the sound turned down.

Like many nonverbal children, Jesy compensates for his lack of vocabulary with physical force. He often hoards toys at school or shoves his younger sister at home. In fact, this aggression was his mother’s explanation when a teacher’s aide first told her that Jesy’s speech was delayed.

“I told Jesy’s mother that he really wasn’t speaking, and she said, ‘He’s so terrible at home. He beats up his little sister,’ ” said Evelyn Paniagua. “Somehow those two things were related for her.”

Non-nons have never before been identified as a distinct group in the Los Angeles Unified or elsewhere in the nation. In fact, the district’s top administrators maintained they numbered only in the hundreds until they ran a computer analysis for The Times, which identified nearly 7,000 new cases last year.

“We didn’t expect it to be that high, and we’re trying to figure out why it is,” said Toni Marsnik, curriculum coordinator in the district’s bilingual-education division.

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As Marsnik points out, it is unclear what the numbers mean--do the children all lack the ability to speak, or do a majority test low because they are unsettled by intimidating circumstances and the probing of strangers?

“They are coming into this huge school from home, and then we test them--any child would be afraid,” contended Jose Manuel Velazquez, principal at Miles Avenue School in Huntington Park, the district’s biggest elementary school and the one with the greatest number of non-nons--107 entering last year alone.

Recent experiments in altering the testing procedure partially validate that view. At Jesy’s school, the pre-Language Assessment System test, which runs students through basic commands and questions--is now given by classroom aides instead of a bilingual coordinator students do not know. That change reduced the number of designated non-nons.

But a discovery last year at Montague Street Elementary in Pacoima makes it clear that some non-nons do face special challenges that can hinder their educational progress. There, the team of educators that reviews cases of struggling students stumbled onto a commonality: More than half of the second- to sixth-graders referred to them with academic and discipline problems had started school with either no or very limited verbal skills.

Though initially chilling, the connection offered clues to a puzzle the school long had tried to solve.

“We were actually very excited to discover this because we think it’s what is really impacting our test scores, that it explains why kids are not reading at the level we want them to read,” said Principal Diane Pritchard.

Montague last fall created a kindergarten class for the incoming non-nons--the first such clustering in the district, perhaps in the nation. They hired a teacher with a remedial tutoring background and added weekly sessions with the school speech therapist.

The class is like a laboratory for studying the non-non phenomenon. Its composition illustrates the wide range of conditions that can shut down language development in young children: At one end of the spectrum are the painfully shy, at the other a few who may have suffered brain damage or mild retardation. But among the 19 students are others whose difficulties reflect more complex causes, such as a boy who lost some hearing when his ear infections were not treated.

Anibal Avilar, 6, is among the shy, casting his eyes downward when the teacher talks to him and talking quietly even to his mother, who says that from early in his life she knew he was different, far less communicative than his siblings.

Eric Reyes, 5, has a speech impediment that leaves his upper lip heavy, preventing him from forming words. But the speech teacher says this would not have delayed his verbal development if it had been caught earlier, noting his 4-year-old brother has the same problem but, thanks to a year at a special-education preschool, speaks almost normally.

Jose Valtierra, 5, barely speaks at all during school and mostly plays alone. His mother has two children older and two younger than Jose, all living in a trailer parked on a vacant lot in Pacoima. When asked what she thinks might have gone wrong, she looks off in the distance.

“He’s very self-conscious,” Margarita Valtierra said. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

As the differences among the boys suggest, the non-non classroom places new demands on a kindergarten teacher accustomed to teaching boisterous youngsters to raise their hands and wait their turn before speaking.

While the kindergartners next door were sitting in a neat circle and talking about their families and pets, non-non teacher Toby Tilles faced a clump of youngsters who ignored her and interacted with each other in grunts and baby talk and by hitting and “rolling around like puppies” on the classroom rug.

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Slowly, she began coaxing words out of them, using techniques ranging from songs to sign language. When she talks, she pronounces each word carefully, repeats frequently, then urges the students to answer questions with more than a nod. Every lesson has a hands-on component, every response is recognized.

“I reward every approximation of a word. I started the year with very concrete rewards--stickers on hands--and now I can use mostly verbal rewards,” Tilles said.

After they make Lego models during a free play period one morning, Tilles draws them together on the floor and has each describe what they have made.

“What is this?” she prompts one boy. “Que es esto?”

“Un ah-oh,” he says, clutching an airplane-like structure.

“Un aeroplano? Say ‘aeroplano.’ ”

He tries.

“Good, good. Muy bien!”

Although nearly all the students are from Spanish-speaking families, Tilles teaches mostly in English--with translation support from an aide--so the children do not have the added burden of trying to learn two languages.

Montague has not given up on the idea that parents or guardians must play a role in turning the non-nons around. In fact, Tilles has taught willing parents how to print letters primary-school style, and by 7:30 every morning, eight or nine are in class, helping their children learn to write.

Anna Avilar comes for half an hour before rushing to work at a Burbank jewelry factory. Toward the end of the school year, as she helped Anibal write “Me gusta jugar con la computadora”--I like to play with the computer--and read it back, she reflected on his improvement:

“He was so shy at the start, they said he would probably stay in kindergarten another year. But now he’s doing great.”

Because the mothers frequently are withdrawn themselves, Avilar’s enrollment in adult-school English classes for the first time this summer is viewed as another victory for the program.

Progress with the non-nons has been slow but steady. When the speech teacher tested them in May, she found all had grown by at least one year in speaking skills--and some by an unusual three years--although most remained a year or more behind their age group. Even now, the list of words they volunteer for their writing practice mirrors the average 30-month-old’s vocabulary.

Nonetheless, this fall the school plans to let all but three students move to first grade. Two will go into special education, primarily for speech therapy. Only one will be held back.

Based on that outcome, Montague plans to organize another non-non class for the next school year.

But officials know the real solution lies not in special classes but in prevention--getting to the children before they fall behind their peers, and teaching parents to encourage language growth. At Montague, they hope to start a child care program for 2- and 3-year-olds and begin LapRead--a class that teaches parents to read to children while holding them in their laps.

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At Hollywood’s Santa Monica Boulevard Elementary, a group of mothers--most Latino and Armenian immigrants--meets for LapRead before school once a week.

Recruiting mothers as they dropped older children at school, teacher Julie Tuomi started the year showing how photo albums could be the first book a parent shares with a child, even if that parent does not read. Now she reads books aloud to the group, illustrating the stories with a felt board and objects.

“You don’t need to have props like this,” she tells the mothers. “You can just open the book and have the children point to things and discuss them.”

Such advice may seem elementary, but the mothers say they appreciate it.

“I have learned so much more about how to teach her,” said Irene Villareal, who has brought her 2-year-old daughter to LapRead for several months. “Sometimes, it’s hard to imagine what to do.”

The urgency of beginning early is borne out in a study of kindergartners and first-graders being conducted by Huttenlocher, the Chicago psychologist. She found that once children begin school, their speaking and comprehension skills rarely advance more than a year annually--so those who start behind, stay behind.

More than a decade ago, similar results were recorded with perhaps the first and only non-non ever studied.

He had no disabilities but was raised by deaf parents who did not speak, yet did not sign to him for fear it would handicap him. He was referred to a communications clinic at the University of Connecticut when he was 4 and had the disjointed speech of a 2-year-old.

Even after years of speech therapy, he was able to keep up academically, but his verbal scores still lagged more than two years behind his age group, raising the questions: Can non-nons be helped? And if so, at what age must that help begin?

The academic jury is still out. Most researchers agree that there are windows of language acquisition opportunity that, once missed, cannot be re-created.

Yet for Jesy’s teachers, such deep concerns evaporated in one moment this spring:

He stood at the phonics board in front of his preschool classmates and, with help from the teacher’s aide, he slowly pieced together two sound cards--ta and sa. He stepped back for a moment, considered his creation, then said in a clear voice: “ta sa . . . tasa”--cup in Spanish.

“Jesy!” the aide and his teacher shouted simultaneously.