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Families Absorb Languages Through Children (washingtonpost.com)

Gordon Johnston knows where to go when his 6-year-old daughter, Janet, needs help with her homework. There’s the Spanish/English dictionary, for starters, and a free online translation service when the going gets harder.

advertisement   Gordon Johnston, center, and Karen Helbrecht, right, work with their daughter, Janet Johnston, a student in a Spanish language immersion program, on her homework. (Michael Williamson — The Washington Post) E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Version Subscribe to The Post

Gordon Johnston knows where to go when his 6-year-old daughter, Janet, needs help with her homework. There’s the Spanish/English dictionary, for starters, and a free online translation service when the going gets harder.

But the really reliable sources, his favorites, are the same little books she’s studying in her Spanish language immersion program at Mount Vernon Community School in Alexandria.

“There are these fairly simple readers at her grade level,” Johnston said. “I look at the readers when there are words I don’t know. I just look at the pictures.”

As more parents enroll their children in immersion programs, hoping to prepare them for life and work in a global economy, some are confronting a slightly unnerving challenge: how to help a child study various subjects — not just reading and writing but science and math — in a language they themselves neither speak nor understand.

Imagine, for instance, quizzing your child for a spelling test on Japanese words. Now imagine an arithmetic problem in German, Chinese or French.

“It was scary the first year — early on, it was about looking at the words and just trying to make sense out of it,” said Arnisher Boyer, whose 11-year-old daughter attends Robert Goddard French Immersion School in Prince George’s County.

But school systems have come up with creative ways to help parents cope. Some send answer sheets home so parents can check their children’s work — even if they don’t know what it means — and others offer after-school language classes for parents. Some parents schedule vacation trips, so their families can get a taste of a language and culture, or they host foreign-exchange visitors.

Immersion programs have spread rapidly in the United States, from 30 in 1987 to 266 this year, according to the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics. Fairfax County has 26 such programs in four languages — French, Spanish, German and Japanese — while Montgomery County has five, including one in Chinese. There are five in Arlington County, two in Alexandria and one each in Prince George’s and the District.

The programs come in various forms. Among them is one-way immersion, in which English-speaking students take half their classes each day in a foreign language. Two-way immersion combines English-speaking students with an equal number of students who are native speakers of the foreign language, most commonly Spanish, and divides the school day between the two languages.

Educators say the benefits can be huge, even if children don’t achieve fluency in the foreign language they are studying, because beginning to learn a second language enhances their understanding of their own.

“There is oodles of research showing the tremendous advantage with acquiring a second language,” said Virginia Collier, a George Mason University professor who has done extensive research in this field. “The stimulus of acquiring a second language raises the intellectual academic achievement of all students.”

Collier said it takes about six years — all of elementary school — for most children to work at grade level in a second language, so parents shouldn’t worry that their kids are falling behind if they don’t get it right away.

But some parents worry equally about falling behind their kids, about losing touch with what’s being taught. That’s why Janet Johnston’s mother, Karen Helbrecht, decided to take a Spanish class when her daughter enrolled at Mount Vernon. She said the homework is harder than she thought, “and it’s getting harder.”

Delana Borja, whose son Andrew, 7, is a second-grader in the Spanish immersion program at Francis Scott Key Elementary School in Arlington, also took language classes, hoping to be able to help him. But she said he is grasping the language already, with or without his parents.

“I have a friend from the Dominican Republic, and she will speak to him and he’ll answer,” Borja said. “I can’t believe he can do that.” She hopes to take him to the Dominican Republic or another Spanish-speaking country to reinforce what he’s learning.

Like Borja and Helbrecht, Boyer decided to take French classes five years ago, when daughter Aja enrolled in the immersion program at Goddard.

“I failed miserably,” she said, laughing. “But it gave me a look at the rules . . . and I was learning about verbs when she was learning about verbs.”

Today, Aja is flourishing in French. “She says, ‘This time I can help you, Mommy,’ ” Boyer said. “She can do the translating.”

Japanese, based on a different alphabet and sentence structure than Western languages, is another thing entirely for children and parents.

Camille Grigg, whose 9-year-old son has been in the program at Floris Elementary School in Herndon for four years, said she relies on answer keys sent home by teachers.

“Even if we don’t know what they mean, we can compare the characters,” Grigg said. “But it’s not like normal spelling, where we can say to him what it means.”

She is of Chinese descent and speaks no Chinese, nor were courses in the language offered in Fairfax. But she was eager for her son to learn an Asian language, a possible advantage in the job market. She said she was floored when he came home one day and recited the Pledge of Allegiance in Japanese.

Robin Almen said her children — Ben, 14, and Kate, 10 — needed the challenge of the Japanese immersion programs they’ve been in for several years. Three years ago, the family invited a Japanese teacher to stay with them for several weeks while she was visiting the school.

Ben and Kate got to practice their language skills at the dinner table, and the whole family learned more about Japan.

Kathy Takahashi, whose husband is from Japan, enrolled their daughter, Rachel, 11, in the immersion program at Floris because she wants her daughter to understand her heritage.

“When we visit Japan, I want her to be able to speak to her grandparents,” Takahashi said.

Some parents are offering travel as an incentive and a capstone to their children’s language education.

Jacques Chevalier II said he thought his son Jacques III ought to know a second language, and French — given their name and origins, part African American, part Louisiana Creole — seemed the right choice.

He has promised his son, age 11 and a student in Goddard’s French immersion program, that they will go to Africa.

“I promised him that by 12th grade, I would take him to one of the French-speaking African countries — Cameroon, Togo or Senegal,” Chevalier said.

For now, their answering machine features young Jacques delivering the greeting in English and French.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2003 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Edit this entry.