The sheer number of languages that suburban children speak–as many as 60 in one district–increasingly has forced schools to install programs that teach intensive English, or immerse non-English speaking students in English in regular classrooms.
The children don’t get instruction in their native language for part of the day as they might in a bilingual course. And the system is working, local officials say.
By the end of one school year, most students learn enough English that they no longer need the intensive English sessions, said Bozena Bartek, instructional assistant at Schaumburg Elementary School District 54.
After three years, most students are no longer struggling and they fit into the regular classes, said Rosemarie Meyer, bilingual curriculum coordinator at Wheeling Elementary School District 21.
In most schools, special class periods or tutors give non-English speaking students individualized help, but only Spanish-speaking students, because of their numbers, tend to get lessons in their native language. They typically take bilingual classes for three years.
Districts immerse students in English because they do not have the resources to teach in the dozens of languages represented in their schools.
“There’s no way we could do a bilingual program,” said Marie Jackson, ESL team leader in Arlington Heights School District 25. “This year, we have over 40 different languages. At one time, we had more than 50 altogether.”
This fall, a kindergarten class in Des Plaines School District 62 will try to combine the native language teaching of a bilingual class with the intensive English of an ESL class. A pilot program will combine equal numbers of young Spanish and English speakers in one classroom. Lessons will alternate between the languages so that both sets of students, officials hope, will emerge with a command of both languages.
There are about 200 of these so-called dual-language or two-way programs nationwide.
“It’s primarily seen as an enrichment program, rather than a bilingual class, which is seen as a remedial program,” said Richard Seder, director of education studies at the Reason Public Policy Institute in Los Angeles. “In both cases, the kids live up to the expectations forced on them.”
The number of students needing to learn English has quadrupled in suburban Cook County since 1984, while the number doubled in Chicago in the same period.
About 24,500 public school students in suburban Cook need English instruction, according to the state Board of Education’s most recent census of non-English speaking students.
“People erroneously think that non-English speaking kids only live in the city of Chicago, and that is simply not true,” said Karen Sakash, professor of bilingual education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The suburbs have a large number of Spanish speakers, but students are speaking Polish, Arabic, Japanese or Urdu, a language of Pakistan and India.
In February, the Chicago Public Schools backed away from teaching students in their native language by limiting students to three years in such classes.
This month, California voters went further by passing Proposition 227, which mandates a single year for public school students to learn English in special classes.
The debate in teaching non-English speaking students has centered on which type of classes best teach English to students: bilingual classes, where they are taught academics in their native language while they learn English; English as a second language classes, where they are taught the mechanics of English while learning academics in regular classrooms; or some variation of the two.
Chen Kasher was a 6-year-old when his family moved from a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel, to Rolling Meadows in 1994. On his first day at Hunting Ridge Elementary School, he found his language, Hebrew, useless in a class of English speakers.
“He did not know even one word of English,” said Chen’s mother, Michal Kasher. “On his first day, he motioned with his hands to his mouth that he was thirsty. The teacher thought he had an asthma attack.”
In a flurry, school aides examined Chen and called his mother. Kasher–who learned English from television–assured them that her son was not asthmatic.
“The next day, I taught him the words for water and bathroom,” she said.
