Date sent: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 16:14:49 -0600 (CST)
From: LindaP (Texas)
Subject: Bi-lingual, Bi-language

Loop members :

11:23 AM 10/30/1995

Dual voices

Two area schools get grants for language program

By CAROL CHILDERS

ThisWeek Correspondent

Two southwest Houston elementary schools -- Twain and Cunningham -- have been tagged to receive grant money totaling more than $2 million from the U.S. Office of Education.

The money is to be used to establish a bilingual, two-way language program in each school.

The program is intended to help Spanish-speaking students maintain their native language while learning a second language, as well as offering English-speaking students the opportunity to become bilingual.

Twain Elementary, 3801 Underwood, will receive $900,000 and already has implemented its program at two grade levels -- kindergarten and first grade. The school has 22 children per dual-language class with a substantial list of students waiting to join the program.

Elsa Graham, teacher of the first-grade, two-way language class, said Twain's staff was pleasantly surprised to receive the grant. Traditionally, Title Seven grants for bilingual education are given to East and West Coast schools, she said.

Last year, the Houston Independent School District's Herod Elementary received a grant to start a pilot two-way language program. Schools in Lubbock and El Paso have received similar grants, Graham said.

Suzanne Sutherland, principal of Cunningham Elementary, 5100 Gulfton, said she was the most surprised when the grant she wrote was awarded $1.3 million. She said she wrote the grant during a five-day period last May as she dealt with closing the school for the summer and report cards.

Sutherland, who is a former director of English Language Arts for HISD, worked closely with the district's multilingual department's consultant, Steve Jackson, during the writing of the grant. Cunningham's staff is using the present school year to plan its two-way language program.

In the grant, funds are earmarked for technology advancements, educational conferences for teachers, Spanish books and resource materials. Later this month, seven of the school's teachers will travel to the Texas Association of Bilingual Educators' state conference in El Paso to learn more about two-way language programs.

During the planning period, Sutherland and other school staff visited the Herod Elementary program, which is in its second year of its own two-way language education. Herod's program was the pilot for HISD.

Early next year, Cunningham will host focus groups for parents to obtain their ideas for the two-way language program.

"I want this program to be a learning language acquisition starting in the lower grades and building each year," Sutherland said.

Twain bilingual education teachers Gracie Martinez and Graham were ready to roll when they received their grant notification one week before school was supposed to start.

"We already had our children ready; the people had already signed up," Martinez said. "We were ready to start."

Twenty-eight percent of Twain's student population is what Martinez calls Limited English Proficient.

In Twain's two-way language program, there is one kindergarten class and one first grade class, each with 11 Spanish-speaking and 11 English-speaking students. Eighty percent of the class is taught in Spanish, and 20 percent is taught in English with the appropriate reading and language classes taught in the students' native language. Everything else -- math, social studies, science, art and music -- is strictly in Spanish.

Twain's grant money will supply each bilingual teacher an aide and computers in the classroom. A large part of the grant money goes to El Liceo -- a literary development center in Spanish, which provides a holistic approach to language, Martinez said.

"The teacher who will instruct through this program also will be the coordinator for Twain's two-way language program. El Liceo is a cousin of the English literary program already operating at Twain.

The school staff will be offering English as a second language classes to Spanish-speaking parents and Spanish as a second language to English-speaking parents. Workshops planned for parents hopefully will bring the two groups together, Martinez said.

"In the past, some of (the Spanish-speaking parents) may have felt isolated so they didn't participate as much," Martinez said. "This will be a way to bridge that gap."

Martinez said the biggest impact she has seen with two-way language programs is in the area of socialization.

"In the past, with a regular bilingual classroom, my children have always felt isolated from the rest of the school because they were known as the `Spanish kids,' and that was the `Spanish room.' Now, they're no longer the Spanish kids or the Spanish classroom. It is our classroom. And my boys and girls -- no matter what language they speak -- they get together; they play together; they invite each other to be in their plays; they invite each other to work together. It's really neat to see, because that never happened before."

The 80-20 language model doesn't hinder the English speakers' ability to learn, because students are paired up, Martinez said.

"So if the English speaker doesn't understand what's going on, the Spanish speaker can translate," she said. "This helps both of them."

There is even spill over from the two-way language program onto other children in the school.

Graham said she sees some girls from her classes teaching Spanish to other girls in their Brownie Scout troop.

The teachers' hopes for the future include expansion of the two-way language program into middle school and high school.

"So that these children who are in the program have the opportunity to go from kindergarten through 12th grade and graduate being bicultural, biliterate, and they truly have the sense of being bilingual. I hope it can become this way," Martinez said.

Currently, bilingual education in HISD is a transitional program where the Spanish-speaking kids go straight into English after third grade.

"We push, push, push to get them out of Spanish and get them into English," Graham said. "This program is different in that we want to maintain their bilingualism and their biliteracy through the end of fifth grade."

She echoed the hopes that the two-way language program would continue into middle school, where students can take Spanish literature classes.

"There are teachers and departments at the secondary level where it would be practically easy to modify the Spanish as a second language and Spanish literature classes so that these children could easily flow into those."

"The earlier you start with your second language instruction, the more fluent you will be," Graham said. "So the prime time for a child to learn a second language is before they are 12 years old. Besides the regular curriculum, that's one positive aspect of this program."

"My goal for this program is when they are in third and fourth grade, that I can go up to them and speak to them in Spanish and in English -- in their other language -- and they can understand everything that I'm saying," Graham said.

"I see it only happening in little chunks right now, but that's first grade -- period," she said.

"Once this program gets going, just like with anything else, everything becomes smoother and more efficient," she said. "I think efficiency is going to have a big impact. In the future, I don't think they will need as much money to get the programs going in other schools."