(Part 3 of 3) Students at Kalamazoo’s El Sol Elementary learn in both English and Spanish. But they don’t use their knowledge just to complete their homework.
Instead, they find a variety of ways to use their dual-language skills to their social advantage. That’s what a Western Michigan University anthropologist – who’s also an El Sol parent – is finding in her research at the school.
In the last of a three-part series, WMUK reports on some of the unexpected benefits of bilingualism.
On a recent morning at El Sol, first graders call out answers in Daniela Saldaña’s math class.
“Seeeeiiiisss!” they say, when she asks them for the sum of five plus one. Saldaña tells them they´re right. “Cinco y uno más son seis.”
Among the kids, who are sitting in a circle looking at pictures of dots, sits linguistic anthropologist Kristina Wirtz.
“Rather than studying language primarily as an abstract, logical system, we study language as something people do,” she says.
“And create meaning, create social relationships and come to basically structure our social world through the ways in which we communicate.”
Wirtz watched these El Sol students last year too, when they were in kindergarten. She hopes to follow them all the way through fifth grade to see how they use the skills they acquire in English and Spanish. She says she’s amazed at how deftly the El Sol students toggle between the two.
“I may be working with three kids,” she says as an example. “Maybe two of them are good friends from outside of school who both have Spanish as a home language, carrying on their important social life with each other in Spanish.”
And in the same group, kids from English-speaking homes answer Wirtz in English even though she’s speaking Spanish to them.
“So the two kids speaking in Spanish have no interaction or just sort of momentary, ‘hand me that piece of paper, it’s my turn with those little plastic animals now,’ in English - but otherwise smoothly continuing their conversation in Spanish. And the other kid is perhaps talking with me, using only English and the inverse of that too.”
Wirtz says research shows that people don’t have to speak a second language fluently to benefit from it. Even picking up a few words or phrases can offer a subtle but important social edge. In other words,
“We can use resources from languages that we would never claim to be speakers of,” she says.
Sarah Hill has two children at El Sol. As it happens, she’s also an anthropologist and a colleague of Wirtz’s at Western. She says she’s seen her older daughter use language as a “resource,” as Wirtz puts it, to have private conversations with her mom.
“She can sneak in a Spanish conversation which at this point the younger child can’t understand. And that’s – I mean children are manipulative for sure and will kind of compete with each other. But I notice that she’s – I mean this has been for a few years now – she really enjoys doing that,” Hill says.
Incidentally, the students find all sorts of resourceful ways to merge English and Spanish. Here’s Mimi Leak, who works in the office and has three children at El Sol.
“They were going to iron their clothes. My son – and in Spanish it’s blanchiar, and in English it’s iron. So he was going to “ironar” his clothes,” she says.
And sometimes her kids mix and match words from each.
“You know – mommy I’m going to go afuera or things like that and I think they think it’s cute that they can do it, so sometimes like my younger one will do it on purpose, like she’ll say oh mommy it’s really frio – it’s really cold outside. So I think she enjoys the fact that she’s enjoying these new words and then knows when to use them,” Leak says.
Hill says responding to that kind of creative usage requires tact. She corrects mistakes on her children’s homework. But otherwise, she says, she doesn’t want to crush their enthusiasm. One of her daughters has sometimes been reluctant to learn Spanish.
“It was very clear that in other contexts outside the house that she was quite proud of being able to do things in two languages, but she was just utterly resistant to it at home. So I have not wanted to correct any of these kind of cute inventions they come up with because I want her to feel comfortable,” she says.
Teachers and staff say they work to direct kids to the right terms without discouraging them.
But what’s more of a problem is that all the students – even the native Spanish speakers - tend to favor English outside the classroom, for instance, on the playground.
Fifth graders Noah, Isaac and Sawyer were out for recess. Asked what language they speak together, they say “English! Because we all know it really well.” They say they do use Spanish a “tiny bit” together.
Wirtz says it’s not hard to figure out why the kids favor English. They know it has a “special value and power” in the US and beyond, and that it’s the dominant language where they live. She gives the example of a group of working together on math, which the kids study in Spanish.
“You’ll find that yes, they are saying ‘two plus two equals four,’ for example, in Spanish, but ‘no! It’s my turn now,’ comes out in English, most of the time with most combinations of kids,” she says.
The students also know how to wield their skills against their peers, a less happy example of language as a resource. Wirtz describes how some kids will give peers a hard time for speaking Spanish.
“Kids whose home language is Spanish come up to me, knowing from the morning that I speak Spanish. And either want to chat with me in Spanish or perhaps even ask me for vocabulary words. You know, 'how do you say horno in English' – oh it’s oven. ‘Okay, how do you spell that?’ And some of those interactions unfolding in Spanish and having other kids say, don’t use that language, this is English time.”
The school does everything it can to counter the tug of English, says Principal Heather Grisales.
“We try to encourage them and ‘oh, muy bien, usarse el Español, good job you used Spanish’ – and they have, like classroom points. I even have one teacher who, once they reach a certain amount of points of certain responses then they have a celebration of Spanish,” she says.
Grisales tends to stick to Spanish when addressing students – even when they don’t – for example, when she greets them.
“On Friday do we have to go to school?” asks a student coming in the door in the morning. “No tienes escuela el Viernes,” Grisales responds.
But just because they favor English when they’re visiting, doesn’t mean the student at El Sol don’t care about Spanish. Evelia Osorio is the parent of a fifth grader.
“My son is so happy to be able to be bilingual that every time we go to a gas station he was like, ‘oh, I speak Spanish!’ So that made me like, okay, we can do it!”
Siblings do their part to motivate each other.
“My daughter told my son, ‘well we’re going to California, you don’t speak Spanish. So you’re not going to be able to understand or talk with grandma.’ And he was like, ‘I will! You will see!’ So that was really something that pushed to keep learning,” Osorio says.
And several groups of kids out for recess said they wouldn’t go to a single-language school if they could.
“It’s nice to learn two because if you go to a different country then you might want to learn how to speak their language so then you can communicate with them,” says third grader Maya.
“And it’s easier to learn a second language when you’re younger,” says McKenna, also in third grade.
Kalamazoo currently has no dual-immersion middle or high schools. But the school district is considering whether it can at least hold one class at the middle school level where students who went to El Sol would continue to learn in Spanish. Osorio says she’d very much like to see that happen. So would many other parents at El Sol.
