Speaking and learning Spanish

February 2, 2010 – 11:31 am

Students learn Spanish by writing to each other

When Astrid Felter wanted high schoolers in her beginner Spanish class to practice the language, she turned to experts: Spanish-speaking first-graders.

“I was trying to think of a way for my kids to put the language to use,” said Felter, a Spanish teacher at Niwot High. “I want the Spanish I kids to think, ‘OK, we’re doing this for a reason.’”

Since November, high school students in Niwot High’s pre-International Baccalaureate Spanish I class have been swapping letters with a class of bilingual first-graders at Central Elementary.

“It’s a great partnership,” said Valarie Agnallo, first-grade bilingual teacher at Central Elementary. “For sure (the first-graders’) writing skills are better. They’re learning to write a letter and answer questions.”

Both grades write to one another in Spanish. Despite the students’ age gap, both teachers said many of their lessons focus on similar concepts, such as reading and writing in complete sentences. Basic vocabulary — shapes, colors, numbers — also tends to overlap between the grades.

The pen pals met face to face for the first time Thursday morning to read to one another and play games.

“I brought you a story for us to read together,” freshman Ana Crane, 15, said as she pulled out a homemade book for her pen pal, Alexis Mosqueda-Yanez, 6.

“And I brought some colors so we can draw,” she continued, pulling a box of markers out of her backpack. “How does that sound?”

Alexis nodded shyly. By the end of the story, the pair were happily coloring the final page of the book.

In his first letter to 7-year-old Erik Gutierrez, freshman Jim Jolly, 14, wrote about his classes and baseball. Gutierrez’s reply included a similar introduction.

“My favorite animal is the snakes — all the snakes,” he said, explaining what details he included in his letter. “My favorite color is blue, and I can do a lot of kinds of math.”

Leslie McConnell is long past the age when the mind is a blank slate for language learning. She took her last forgettable Spanish class in college and since then has made only minor attempts to keep up with the language.

Speaking Their Language. Grad students take Spanish lessons to Roxbury

But on a recent night, she dreamed of conjugating verbs in Spanish. “For once,” she says, “I can honestly say that I’m acquiring a language. Always in the past, I was just learning it by rote.”

McConnell is part of an unlikely group of language learners who congregate each Wednesday in the common room of the Camfield Garden Estates housing development in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. Taught by Graduate School of Arts & Sciences student volunteers, many of the class participants are senior citizens, although there are teenagers and working professionals, too. They come from a range of backgrounds: mostly African-American, but also Hispanic, Irish, and Lithuanian. And all of them come to class each week not because they have to, but because they want to be able to communicate with Spanish speakers in their lives, or just out of intellectual curiosity.

“I felt I needed to take the class because we live in a bilingual society, and I want to be able to communicate with more people,” says McConnell, a social worker at Whittier Street Health Center in Roxbury. “I work with Spanish-speaking people every day, and now I try out my Spanish with them.”

The course, which began in March 2008, is the brainchild of BU alumna Jewelle Anderson (CFA’84). A retired Boston Public Schools teacher, Anderson has been a community volunteer for years. She decided to launch the class after senior citizens at the Women’s Service Club of Boston, where she was vice president, told her they wanted an opportunity to learn Spanish. The club is a community service organization founded for black women.

With only a tiny budget for the class, Anderson needed volunteer teachers. So she approached James Iffland, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of romance studies, then head of the Spanish section and now department chair, to see if he could recommend any graduate students willing to volunteer their time. “I knew that BU would have great teachers,” she explains. Iffland promised her he would send along some of his best.

He saw an opportunity to help senior citizens and other local residents, as well as to enrich graduate students’ experience. “It seemed to be a perfect project for our students to provide a service to the community,” says Iffland. “It also gives graduate students a chance to teach in an environment that is very different from the environment they’ve been teaching in at BU. I think that universities should be doing more of this type of activity.”

Drawn by flyers and newspaper advertisements Anderson had posted, 20 students showed up the first day, and over the next few months, all but 3 attended regularly. As the students and teachers got to know one another, they developed a strong camaraderie. In December 2008, the students organized a party to celebrate their first year together and to thank instructors Megan Gibbons (GRS’11), Maria Luisa Martinez (GRS’11), and Peter Mahoney (GRS’11).

The three, all planning to become Spanish professors, say the experience has broadened their perspective on what learning can be. “I have gained a continuing appreciation that learning is, or can be, a lifelong process,” says Gibbons. “I had an 80-year-old in my class who came in with a cane. She had a great sense of humor about learning a new language at her age. I was humbled.”

Cultural exchange: Sisters Lashema Rivera, 15, and Tatyanna McGuire, 21, faithfully attend every class. They say they are taking the class so that they can converse more easily with their Spanish-speaking relatives.

“When I was little, I knew how to speak Spanish fluently,” explains Rivera, whose father is Puerto Rican. “But I got out of touch with it, so I want to be able to be closer to my other relatives. Also, in today’s society being bilingual really helps. All of my friends speak Creole or Japanese or Spanish.” Their grandmother, Betty Lou McGuire, is also in the class, and the three practice their Spanish together regularly.

They exemplify the cultural fusion occurring in Roxbury. In recent decades, the predominantly African-American neighborhood has seen an influx of immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. A walk through the busy retail district and public transportation hub Dudley Square is a study in diversity. A group of teenagers converse in Spanish, sprinkled with English phrases, as they wait for a bus. A local merchant from Jamaica greets customers at his fruit stand as reggae from his stereo pulses out into the square. In front of One United Bank, a branch of the largest African-American-owned and -managed bank in the country, a group of elderly men catch up on the day’s gossip.

While interactions among the groups are usually peaceful, misperceptions and distrust can strain relations.

“One of the reasons the class interested me was that it is a small opportunity to begin to improve the relationship between African-Americans and Latinos,” says Iffland. “I just think that if more African-Americans begin to learn Spanish and learn about Latino culture, and if Latinos learn more about African-American culture, some of the friction that has marked the relationship may begin to disappear.”

The class is a prototype of how positive intercultural learning can work. The teachers are patient. The students are motivated and ask a lot of questions, particularly about the Spanish-speaking countries their teachers have visited. They want to know how life is lived in those countries. Anderson suggested they go on a trip together to Madrid, Spain, to experience the culture and language firsthand.

The students took up the challenge with gusto. Since last May, they have held potluck fundraisers, offering fried fish, barbecued ribs, peach cobbler, candied yams, and a whole array of other dishes to local residents. McGuire alone provided sweet potatoes, candied yams, and peach cobbler. “They were from heaven,” remembers Anderson.

A good life: A commitment to education runs in Anderson’s veins. The daughter of a doctor and a schoolteacher, she was born in Alexandria, La., in 1932, a time when black children rarely received an equal education.

“My grandmother was one of the first blacks to teach in New Orleans public schools,” Anderson (right) recalls. “It was embedded in my family that the women were schoolteachers. Men in my family were doctors, or were on the police force. That’s the way it was.”

As a student at BU, Anderson met other African-American classmates, including a young man named Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59), who was pursuing a doctorate in systematic theology. “I got to know Martin well,” she says. “We had a circle of friends who would get together regularly. It was a tight-knit black community at the time.”

Anderson was drawn to working with children, as had her mother, grandmother, and aunts before her. She worked for a time with preschoolers at the YWCA on Clarendon Street, and taught history, social studies, art, and music to elementary and middle school students in the Boston Public Schools for 22 years, retiring in 2003.

Her interest in education led her back to the classroom, this time organizing the Spanish class. “I wanted this to be a joyful class,” she says. “I want to see growth, to have them learn about Spanish food and go to a foreign country — and see the social life of a foreign country.”

Anderson’s vision has become a reality, creating a fruitful partnership between BU and the Women’s Service Club that nurtures both students and teachers. Iffland is committed to the collaboration. “I would like to really strengthen this relationship, and recruit more students willing to take the extra time to teach in Roxbury,” he says. “I want to make sure this program continues and expands. It seems to be a perfect fit between the needs of the Boston community and the capacity of BU to help.”

Spanish immersion class offered

Sara Eide studied Spanish in high school and college and while living in Guatemala and Ecuador. But in a few years, her 5-year-old twins will probably know the language better than she does.

This fall, Maria and Anna Rose Eide will join 20-some fellow students at St. Anthony School in what is believed to be Des Moines’ first Spanish immersion program. The youngsters will learn everything most kindergartners learn, but they will learn almost all of it in Spanish.

Eide, who heads the Catholic Diocese of Des Moines’ education committee, pressed St. Anthony officials to consider adding the program for the school’s English-speaking students.

Principal Joe Cordaro, who did research and toured a program at Our Lady of Guadalupe in Dubuque, decided adding the language program would help boost enrollment and would give students an advantage.

“What we’re teaching our kids is to be part of the global society,” Cordaro said. “If they can speak a second language, that just gives our kids a leg up.”

Research shows children under 7 are more able to learn a second language than their older peers.

Studies have also shown that elementary students immersed in a language program are more likely to become proficient in a second language than those who are exposed to it in small doses during the school day, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C.

The center’s directory shows about 310 foreign language immersion programs in 263 schools across the United States. Louisiana, Hawaii and Oregon are the states with the highest numbers of programs.

Similar programs are offered in other Iowa schools. Woodbury Elementary School in Marshalltown offers a dual-language program beginning in kindergarten. Students are taught half the day in English and the other half in Spanish. Similar programs are also offered in Sioux City and West Liberty.

A foreign language immersion program was introduced this school year in some St. Louis schools, where officials have said on their Web site that young students who are immersed in a second language have better brain development, memory and cognitive learning.

It’s those skills the backers of St. Anthony’s new program hope will develop in their students.

The immersion program will begin with a single kindergarten section of about 28 youngsters, who will learn every subject in Spanish except physical education, religion and music.

The school will add a new Spanish-speaking teacher each year as those youngsters progress to fifth grade, and new immersion students will fill in behind them.

But in order for the program to work, parents must commit to keeping their children in the Spanish-intensive classrooms, Cordaro said. If students leave the program before they complete fifth grade, they might fall behind their peers in reading and writing in English. That’s because the program won’t teach reading and writing in English until second grade.

The payoff for the commitment is big, Cordaro said: “If they stay in the program until fifth grade, they’ll be bilingual.”

About 10 percent of St. Anthony’s students are native Spanish speakers, but children who already speak Spanish won’t be part of the immersion program. A second kindergarten class will maintain an English curriculum for those students, as well as youngsters whose parents prefer a more traditional curriculum.

Tuition won’t be higher for the immersion program, though a registration fee will increase because of the extra materials needed to begin the program. Cordaro said the exact cost hasn’t been finalized, but will be available at an informational meeting on Feb. 11.

Eide said she has heard some reservation from fellow parents, but she thinks many will decide immersion is a good idea for their children.

“The research shows that kids exposed to another language just do better across the board,” she said.

Jessica Alba wants to learn Spanish

London: Hollywood star Jessica Alba has signed up for Spanish lessons to help her take up Latin movies and feel more confident when talking about her Mexican heritage.

The `Sin City` star has admitted that a lot of journalists questioned her roots because she looked Latino but couldn`t speak the language, reported Contactmusic.

Her lack of Spanish led to criticism and suggestions that she wasn`t a true Latina, something that really upset the 28-year-old actress.

“I didn`t want to misrepresent Latinos and I didn`t know how to defend myself. But I went to my room and I cried all night. Since then, I`ve preferred not to comment on the subject,” the website quoted her telling Siempre Mujer magazine.

And now that she has become a mother, she has decided to sign up for Spanish lessons, so she and her daughter Honor can become fluent.

“I know the basics, but I just hired a professor that specialises in Hispanic studies to teach me and Honor. God knows that I wish I was raised bilingual. But it wasn`t to be,” said Alba.

“I want to make movies in Spanish. There are so many interesting themes and stories that are worth sharing, like the lives of immigrants, for example,” the actress added.

_________________________________________
SOURCES:

“Students learn Spanish by writing to each other”
By Magdalena Wegrzyn
Longmont Times-Call
2/1/2010
http://www.timescall.com
http://www.timescall.com/news_story.asp?ID=20574

“Speaking Their Language”
By Jeremy Schwab
February 1, 2010
BU Today
http://www.bu.edu
http://www.bu.edu/today/2010/01/29/speaking-their-language

“Spanish immersion class offered”
By L. LARS HULSEBUS
lhulsebu@dmreg.com
February 2, 2010
http://www.desmoinesregister.com
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20100202/NEWS/2020361/-1/AMES/Spanish-immersion-class-offered

“Jessica Alba wants to learn Spanish”
Saturday, January 30, 2010
http://spicezee.zeenews.com
http://spicezee.zeenews.com/articles/story52676.htm