Russell Campbell, 75; Expert in Language Teaching

Russell Campbell, an intrepid educator who promoted English language instruction in countries such as Egypt and China and introduced a novel program to the United States that taught elementary school students Spanish by immersing them in it all day long, has died. He was 75.

The longtime UCLA professor died March 30 of colon cancer at his home in Los Angeles.

Campbell’s specialty was designing programs to teach modern languages. Much of his work took place abroad, most notably in China during the 1980s.

He spearheaded the largest English language training program in China after normalization of relations with the U.S., establishing four centers that opened up pathways of communication with the West by teaching English to hundreds of Chinese scientists, scholars and business leaders, many of whom had been isolated from developments in their fields during the Cultural Revolution.

At home, he was best known as the visionary behind an innovative approach to language learning in elementary school called immersion education, in which school children as young as 5 receive all their instruction -- from math to reading -- from teachers who speak only Spanish to them.

He persuaded the Culver City Unified School District to offer the first full Spanish immersion program in U.S. schools in 1971. The nationally distinguished program, now in its 32nd year, inspired scores of schools around the country to embrace the immersion approach.

“It’s really wonderful what that man did,” said Madeline Ehrlich, a former Culver City school board president and founder of the national lobbying group Advocates for Language Learning. “Now 20% of the school population of Culver City is in immersion. Many students, like my own children, graduated from it, then traveled all over the world and learned other languages. What the program did was open up the world to them.”

Culver City’s program “was a real pioneering effort,” said Andrew D. Cohen, a University of Minnesota professor who directs a national consortium of language resource centers. “Russ was very concerned about promoting English abroad. But he also was a promoter of programs that would get Americans comfortably fluent in other languages.”

A native of Keokuk, Iowa, who grew up in Kansas City, Mo., Campbell became interested in Spanish in high school when he had a summer job in a meat-packing house. Most of his co-workers were Latino.

“In this ambiente, this environment, I began to acquire some Spanish -- the profanity first,” he told Lorena Llosa in an interview last fall that will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Issues in Applied Linguistics. “It was amazing: These people brought me into their lives. Suddenly, I was going to their fiestas and homes, and they were coming to my place.... I became interested in and found it truly enjoyable -- using another language and gaining entry into another society.”

He studied for two years at Baker University in Baldwin, Kan., where he met his future wife, Marjorie. She survives him, along with son Roger of Versailles, Ky., daughter Paula Wainright of Phoenix and two grandchildren.

After service in the Navy, Campbell transferred to Kansas State Teachers College (now Emporia State University) in Emporia, Kan., where he majored in Spanish. He then worked as a high school Spanish teacher.

Finding few opportunities to improve his Spanish in Kansas, he went abroad during the 1950s, developing English training programs for the United States Information Agency in Argentina and Costa Rica. He later attended graduate school in linguistics at the University of Michigan, but interrupted his studies to conduct fieldwork in applied linguistics in Thailand.

Campbell joined the UCLA faculty in 1964, teaching applied linguistics and training students to become teachers of English as a second language. During his more than three decades at UCLA, he also was the first chairman of the Teaching English as a Second Language Department and introduced courses in Hindi, Thai, Tagalog and Vietnamese. He served as director of the university’s Language Resource Program and its Center for Language Education and Research.

He became interested in immersion language training in 1971 after seeing a program in Montreal in which English-speaking students were taught in French. They emerged from the program after several years, proficient in both languages.

Excited about the possibilities for immersion education in the U.S., Campbell tried to interest officials in the Los Angeles and Santa Monica school districts but was turned down. In many districts, the preferred model was bilingual education, which offers academic instruction in a student’s native language but maintains English fluency as the goal.

“Certainly, any child has the capacity to perform in several languages naturally,” Campbell once said. “It’s only in America we find that odd.”

When Culver City agreed to try immersion, Campbell helped district officials design the curriculum and monitor the results. The program eventually evolved into what has become known as “two-way immersion,” mixing native English and Spanish speakers with the goal of promoting fluency in both languages for all the children.

There are now 266 two-way immersion programs in U.S. schools that teach Spanish and English, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington D.C.

Studies comparing immersion programs with other methods of language teaching, including bilingual education, have shown that students who undergo immersion training are more proficient in the language and have greater cultural sensitivity. They also make overall academic gains.

Culver City’s El Marino School, a magnet school that teaches all its students with the immersion method, boasts some of the highest test scores in the district. The school, which also has a Japanese immersion program, is so popular it chooses students by lottery.

Campbell saw immersion education as an excellent way to preserve languages in ethnic American cultures where speaking only English became the price of assimilation. He called this use of immersion “heritage language education” and focused on building support for it in elementary schools, colleges and universities. He believed that “heritage learners,” because of their familiarity with languages they heard at home, have the ability to achieve high levels of proficiency that would make them valuable assets in government and the global economy.

He was instrumental in the creation in 1990 of the nation’s first two-way Korean and English immersion program in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The program teaches Korean and English to a mix of students, including many who grew up hearing Korean but could not read or write it and others whose home languages were English, Spanish or Tagalog.

Chin Kim, who directed the Korean-English program for six years, said Campbell was especially influential in overcoming Korean parents’ reservations. “This was a time when many Korean parents felt we should leave the Korean teaching to Saturday schools and families,” she said. “He brought in research showing the academic and cultural benefits. That made a big difference.”

Campbell, who did not accept any pay for his involvement as an advisor to the Korean-English program, took pleasure in learning that its students perform well on standardized tests. “They can compete with any gringo in any area, plus, they are literate in Korean,” he told Llosa.

After launching immersion education in the U.S., Campbell resumed his international work. He lived in Cairo for two years during the early 1970s, helping to design a master’s program for English language teachers at the American University. Over the years, he worked in more than a dozen other countries, including Peru, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Taiwan and Japan.

In 1980, he led a UCLA delegation to China, making UCLA one of the first U.S. universities to establish ties with the People’s Republic after the end of the Cultural Revolution.

His efforts in China resulted in the creation of four English language centers in Guangzhou and Beijing. The goal of the schools was to prepare Chinese leaders in science, technology, economics and business to work and study in the U.S. In addition to teaching English, the centers offered cultural education to help Chinese scholars relate to their Western counterparts.

This aspect of the program raised the hackles of some Chinese officials, who feared that their students would adopt Western values. “There were many tensions,” said Margaret van Naerssen, who directed one of the Chinese centers, but Campbell, who was known for his folksy and engaging style, was able to allay them.

Campbell told Llosa that a measure of the program’s effect was that Zhongshan University in Guangzhou now has at least a dozen scholars with UCLA master’s degrees teaching English. “We did that,” he said proudly. “They have probably now taught a million Chinese students and had some impact on their lives.”