In Maritza Bermudez’s home, the goal has been to speak Spanish as much as possible. But starting next school year, Korean will be thrown into the mix.
Bermudez, who lives in Anaheim, is enrolling one of her children in a Korean/English language immersion program – the first of its kind in Orange County and part of a growing trend throughout Southern California.
“We know it’s going to be challenging,” Bermudez said. “But being trilingual is being a step ahead.”
While a new group of kindergarteners, including Bermudez’s son, will be learning their ABC’s in English and Korean, others in the Anaheim Elementary School District will be learning in Spanish and English.
The district will be the first in Orange County, and possibly the state, to offer language immersion programs for at least one class on all of its 23 campuses in the new school year: Korean-English at Jefferson Elementary and Spanish-English everywhere else.
Meanwhile, the idea of teaching in two languages is gaining traction, nationally and in Southern California. Smaller districts, such as Anaheim Elementary, are joined in the trend by some of California’s biggest school districts, such as Los Angeles Unified and Riverside Unified, both of which are expanding their dual-language options.
Culture class
The idea is popular for a lot of reasons. Teachers tout the cognitive benefits. Parents want their kids to get an upper hand in life. And school districts are looking to attract and retain students.
Beyond education, everyone wants future graduates to be equipped to meet the demands of an increasingly diversified community and workplace. And California – a state where some 45 percent of the population over the age of 5 speaks a language other than English in the home – could be ground zero.
“Southern California is one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the United States,” said Maria Carreira, co-director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA, which focuses on immigrant language learning.
A California Department of Education initiative launched last year – “Global California 2030” – sets some relevant goals. By 2030, according to the initiative, half of all K-12 students in the state will become proficient in two or more languages. To reach that 2030 goal, the initiative calls for quadrupling the number of dual immersion programs, from about 400 in 2017 to 1,600.
Learning a second language, experts say, is only part of the picture.
“Their self-esteem goes up, their level of perseverance. The way they tackle learning is amazing. Their brains are just working different than a monolingual brain,” said Michelle Mitchell, instructional services specialist at the Riverside Unified School District, referring to students in dual-language immersion classes.
Carreira, a Cal State Long Beach professor who teaches future bilingual teachers, says education in two languages also helps students socialize better and – when they see their home language taught at school – feel valued.
“Ultimately, bilingual education is not just about language. For the students, it’s about life…. For the rest of us, for society, it’s about making us more competitive in a globalized world by increasing our capacity to communicate effectively with people the world over.”
How it works
Usually, dual-language immersion programs start with a single class, in kindergarten or earlier. And classes usually have a mix of students; some who are English learners, some who speak only English, and some who already speak both languages.
Every year, the school adds bilingual instruction for the next grade up, letting the immersion kids continue in the program at least through elementary school.
There are different models schools follow. In some, as much as 90 percent of the class is taught in the foreign language the first year, with each year adding more English, until it reaches 50-50 in fourth or fifth grade. In another common model, teachers begin the first year by teaching half of the time in English and the other half in a foreign language. At Jefferson Elementary, the Anaheim school that will kick off Orange County’s first Korean-English immersion program, 80 percent of the class initially will be taught in Korean, decreasing to 70 percent in first grade, until fourth grade, when the class will be taught equally in both languages.
Language immersion programs are hardly new. Thirty years ago, Long Beach Unified started its first program, in Spanish. Today it has six.
Long Beach Unified used to have an immersion program in Khmer, which is spoken in Cambodia, according to the district’s Khmer-language class teacher, Darith Ung, who teaches at Wilson High School. But the immersion program was abolished years ago, he said, after California voters in 1998 approved Prop. 227, the “English Language in Public Schools” law that, among other things, required parents to sign waivers to enroll their children in bilingual or dual immersion programs.
Prop. 227 affected programs across the state, educators say. But Proposition 58, approved by voters in 2016, effectively repealed the older law that required English learners to be taught in English immersion classrooms.
That’s leading to a growth in bilingual education, an uptick in teacher’s interest and a need for universities to revive programs that train teachers to work in two or more languages.
“Before Proposition 227, I routinely taught… a course to teach bilingual teachers. After 227, those courses were discontinued,” said Carreira, the Cal State Long Beach professor.
Carreira was part of a committee to bring back those programs after Prop. 58. Since then, she said, her courses have been “packed.”
The programs are not without their challenges – and critics.
Some argue against any kind of immersion for students who are still learning English, saying it delays assimilation. And some complain that the programs have, in some parts of the country, led to a sort of educational gentrification, upper-middle-class parents using immersion as another way to boost their children’s future endeavors.
“I’ve heard concerns that dual-language immersion could be this nice little thing for upper-middle-class parents…like learning piano,” Carreira said.
Also, ot every family with kids still learning English is interested in dual-immersion education. And, for now, districts sometimes are scrambling to find certified bilingual teachers, particularly those who speak languages like Mandarin or Korean.
Growing programs
In L.A. Unified, which has nearly 647,000 students, an estimated 13,000 students are in dual-immersion programs. For most, that second language is Spanish, but for others it’s Korean, Mandarin, Armenian, French or Arabic. By next fall, the district plans to add 43 new programs, most of them on campuses that until now haven’t had dual-language programs, said Lydia Acosta Stephens, who leads the district’s multi-language department. In all, the district has 183 immersion programs in 147 schools, or approximately 15 percent of the district’s campuses.
How long students can take classes in two languages varies by district. By the time students reach middle school or high school – when students take different classes from different teachers – the programs aren’t always sustainable.
At Glendale Unified, which has embraced immersion programs, they are available through eighth grade. The district offers immersion in seven non-English languages, enrolling about a quarter of its students, according to district spokeswoman Kristine Nam. In high school, the students are encouraged to continue their studies through language classes, she said.
Meanwhile, Riverside Unified is looking to expand its program to Poly High this fall, eventually allowing older students to take a translating course at a local college.
Mitchell, the instructional services specialist at the Riverside Unified, suggested a practical reason for the upper-grade push:
“They will be a certified translator when they leave 12th grade.”
Language sells
Immersion programs tend to be very popular, and districts like Riverside Unified have lotteries to determine who can and can’t enroll. And with many districts losing enrollment – sometimes to publicly funded charter schools – immersion programs can be a way to keep neighborhood kids in local schools.
“It’s hard to quantify how many (students) would have left without dual language programs. There’s not a box for them to check,” said L.A. Unified spokeswoman Barbara Jones. “But we do know that, anecdotally, when schools and principals are trying to determine how they can have more neighborhood kids stay in their schools, dual immersion programs are the go-to programs.”
Bermudez, the Anaheim mom who plans to enroll one of her pre-schoolers in the Korean language program, already has a fifth-grader in a Spanish-language program within her district, though not her neighborhood. So she’s happy that the district is expanding immersion programs to all of its campuses.
With five kids, one in college and four at home, Bermudez is looking to keep up their Spanish and help her four-year-old Milan as he begins to learn Korean.
“We’re already looking at videos,” she said, “and maybe some weekends we can visit the Korean Catholic Church in our neighborhood.”
Meanwhile, she has two other pre-schoolers, who both figure to be enrolled in the Anaheim Elementary School District’s immersion programs.
The family speaks Spanish, so if the district were to offer Arabic or Mandarin immersion, Bermudez said she’ll consider it. Four languages, after all, are better than three.
