(Part Two of Three)
How do you teach students in two languages? The answer might seem obvious. Instruct them in one, then the other.
Students at Kalamazoo’s El Sol Elementary do spend part of their day immersed in Spanish and part of it in English. But the educators say there’s more to a good bilingual experience than talking at students and expecting them to keep up.
In the second of a three-part series, WMUK reports on what goes into making a dual language program effective.
At the beginning of the day in teacher Erin Clark’s kindergarten class, she helps the students sound out the letters in the English word “am.”
“Aaaaaaaa-mmmmmmmm-aaaaaaaaammmm,” they say.
If a student were to speak Spanish in this class, Clark would do her best to steer them back to English. That’s because a cardinal rule of language immersion is that when you’re learning one, you avoid the other. Clark says sometimes it’s tough to stay “in code.”
“Especially when a kid’s frustrated, you just want to break down, and talk to them in the language that they can understand. But we really try to stick to it,” she says.
That’s because, as her colleague Danielle Jn Baptiste says, that slope is very slippery.
“That would just give the kid, give the student the opportunity to say or the message saying, ‘all you have to do is just wait because she’ll eventually say it in English,’” she says.
El Sol students learn half of their lessons in Spanish. They learn the other half in English. Immersion learning does require students to struggle with unknown words. But the teachers also find non-code-breaking ways to clue students in – for example, as Jn Baptiste explains, with body language.
“For example, if I tell them to take out their pencils in Spanish, what I would do with my hand is signify that I’m writing. So the thing that I'm writing with so the kids can start to connect the oral word lápiz which is pencil with what I’m showing them with – physically, what would be a pencil, how you would use it so they can make that connection,” she says.
Teachers also help students separate the languages by writing each one in a different color.
“The kids start learning from a young age, oh when they see it in red ‘it’s in English and I have to pronounce and I have to think in English,” says Principal Heather Grisales.
“And when I see it in blue I have to pronounce it in Spanish and use the skills I know in Spanish to pronounce that word.”
Grisales says that’s especially important because some English and Spanish words look the same on paper – with quite different pronunciations.
The instructors want the children to understand that each language is its own separate system. But they also want the children to see that English and Spanish have much in common. The teachers take time to help the students make those connections, using a method called ‘bridging.’ Erin Clark explains how it worked in her classroom after a lesson on shapes.
“I had a chart with all the shapes on it. And I said, what is this shape? And I waited for the response. Most of the time they responded in Spanish because that was the vocabulary they were used to. So I had the oval on the shape, I said what is this shape and they said `óvalo!’
“And I said ‘very good, is that in English or Spanish?’ So they have to make that connection, ‘oh that’s in Spanish.’ ‘Okay what – what is that in English?’ And somebody happened to know it was ‘oval.’”
And many of the kids know the bridging concept by name – or can explain what it means.
“Usually bridging is like when you cross over to both languages and make words out of them,” says fourth grader Eliana.
The school controls the approach in the classroom. But then there’s the learning that goes on at home. Some students can practice just by having conversations with their families. Isaac Rojo is in fifth grade.
“Sometimes I speak to my parents in English but my, what my mom wants is to talk to them in Spanish. So I’m trying to work on that,” he says.
But like the children, many El Sol parents come to the school speaking only one language. And some of them feel at a loss to help their children practice the other one.
“We’ll have parents who are like, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know – the kid will know,” says Mimi Leak.
Leak works in the school’s office. Three of her children attend El Sol, and another is a graduate. She says the kids who come from English-speaking families benefit the most from help at home.
As for the kids from Spanish-dominant families, she says extra English practice “definitely helps, but it is such an English dominant world, that even if they don’t get it at home, they will eventually get it,” she says.
Then again, Leak says she does sometimes see students arrive not knowing any English. She says at first that puzzled her, because even though her family didn’t speak English to her growing up, she still learned it. Leak asked her parents how that happened.
“And they’re like, well because you had to. Cause TV was in English. You know the store was in English, everything was in English.”
But she says that’s changed.
“With the growth of the web and technology there’s now Spanish TV and Spanish radio and Spanish computer games and Spanish computer, and so although it’s a blessing to have all those awesome resources, it’s kind of been hard for those Spanish-speaking families where those kids come in not speaking any English because they haven’t had to,” she says.
Leak says it’s best for parents to try to speak the second language with their kids, even if it's a struggle.
“If they’re willing to ask or to say, hey, I don’t understand or are really up front with, ‘I don’t understand what’s going on, it’s really overwhelming, what can I do, what can I do,’ the kid kind of knows that ‘hey, it’s not me alone in my struggle.’ You know, it’s hard for everybody.”
A lot of the kids do practice at home. They listen to songs or watch movies in their second language. Some of them even turn around and teach what they’re learning to others. Third grader Mitzi says she helps her stepdad practice English.
“I write some sentences in a notebook and he starts to say it, and I just write some other ones to see if he knows them and then he starts to know words a lot,” she says.
Sonja Elsholz has three kids at El Sol. She says they practice Spanish at home, but it’s a challenge.
“I think honestly the biggest way we do it, we will put the subtitles on in Spanish on our TV. And a lot of times – I know minimal Spanish and so I will try to string together a sentence and butcher it horribly and they laugh at me and correct me and they love that. So that’s sort of learning, I figure,” she says with a laugh.
Elsholz says she’s working to improve her Spanish – even when that’s not easy. She recalls a moment from last year in one of her sons’ kindergarten classes.
“I was talking to a little girl about dogs and I tried to ask her in Spanish if she had dogs, and then I said to her, ‘yo soy dos perros,’ and she started laughing, and I’m like, ‘no! Yo soy dos perros!’ and I was trying to say, I have two dogs – that’s not funny – I have two dogs! – and the teacher walked by and said, ‘what did you say to her?’ ‘Yo soy dos perros!’ ‘You just said, you are two dogs,’ she says.
But Elsholz says those moments are worth it if they help her improve her Spanish and speak with her kids. And El Sol teachers say home practice makes a "huge difference" for students trying to master a second language.
Part Three of WMUK’s series on El Sol looks at the resourceful and sometimes unexpected ways its students use their dual-language skills.
