Kids' English fluency flourishes

Kids' English fluency flourishes
Language skills soar in young Spanish speakers, while adults falter

By David Washburn
and Danielle Cervantes
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER / RESEARCH ANALYST
August 15, 2006

HOWARD LIPIN / Union-Tribune

Diana Citron taught her 11th grade English Language Development class yesterday at San Ysidro High School. Attending her class were Brenda Bedoy, 16, (left) and Wendy Gonzalez, 14. English skills have been improving for children from Spanish-speaking households.
School-age children from Spanish-speaking households in San Diego County and throughout California are gaining English fluency at record rates, while fluency among adults – especially seniors – is slipping, according to data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
From 2000 to 2005, San Diego County's percentage of children ages 5 to 17 from Spanish-speaking households who speak English “very well” has jumped to 71 percent from 60 percent.

Meanwhile, English fluency among adult Spanish speakers dropped from 50 percent in 1990 and 2000 to 48 percent in 2005. The census reports a more precipitous decline for those 65 and older. The fluency rate for this group dropped from 45 percent in 1990 to 35 percent in 2005.
Statewide, English fluency rates among Spanish-speakers across all age groups largely mirror those in San Diego County.

These divergent trends materialized while the number of Spanish-speaking immigrants increased at identical 12-percent clips locally and statewide during the first half of the decade, according to the Census Bureau. San Diego County was home to roughly 35,000 more foreign-born Spanish speakers in 2005 than in 2000.

The data comes from the 2005 American Community Survey, part of the Census Bureau's effort to modernize the decennial census and provide annually updated socio-economic data.

Numbers on language ability, experts say, can be explained by both a big push among school districts to boost English fluency and larger, more established immigrant communities in San Diego County where adults have an increasingly easier time getting by with only basic English, or none at all.

This phenomenon has demographers, community leaders and school officials at once rejoicing and wringing their hands.

Fluency will give Latino youths better chances at college degrees and good-paying jobs, experts say. But their parents and grandparents, by not learning English, run the risk of becoming more isolated and stuck at the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder.

“My first response when I saw this data was, 'Yahoo! We are going in the direction we need to be going,' ” said John Weeks, the director of San Diego State University's International Population Center. “Key to success in this country is fluency in English, and we see that happening with children of immigrants.”

Consider Abden Goméz, 16, and his family in San Ysidro.

Abden, his parents and four older siblings all immigrated here from Tijuana in 2004. Two years on, only Abden, a junior at San Ysidro High School, is proficient in English.

So in addition to keeping up with his course work, Abden has another, sometimes all-consuming, responsibility: family interpreter. If an English speaker phones the Goméz household, Abden is summoned. When his mother goes to the grocery store, he tags along to translate. Dad often will call from work with a question about an English word.


CHARLIE NEUMAN / Union-Tribune
Silvia Sanchez washed dishes yesterday at Lola's Market-Deli in Carlsbad. Sanchez is one of a growing number of Spanish-speaking immigrants settling in the county.
Heads of households are responsible for responding to the census surveys, and reporting the English ability of other members of their household. The reporting method leaves open the possibility that heads of households will overstate the English-language ability of other household members.
School officials say the increase in fluency among students is real, and they credit new laws at the federal and state levels for the improvement.

Proposition 227, which California voters passed overwhelmingly in 1998, changed the focus of schools from bilingual education to an English-immersion model. Now, parents who want their English-language learners taught in a bilingual setting must go to the school and sign a waiver. Otherwise, the children are “immersed” in English in the regular classroom.

Since 2002, the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act has required schools to report test scores of English-language learners, and other special-needs children, in their own subgroup rather than lumping them in with the scores of all students.

Both laws have placed significant pressure on schools, and more specifically classroom teachers, to raise the English proficiency level of their students. If schools don't, they risk being cast as “underperforming” and face sanctions.

“Every teacher now realizes that we are all responsible for English learners,” said Alma Pirazzini, director of Academic Support Programs for the Sweetwater Union High School District. “Before, it was assumed that bilingual education programs would take care of them.”
The gains in English fluency over the past several years eventually should translate into better educational attainment among San Diego County Latinos, but the data does not show that yet. Countywide, nearly two-thirds of Latino adults 25 or older have not attended any college, according to the new census data.

“We've seen in the past children gaining language proficiency,” said Fernando Soriano, a professor of human development at Cal State San Marcos. “(But) there seems to be a wall that doesn't allow Hispanics to go beyond a few years of college.”

Soriano and other demographers acknowledge that because census takers only ask educational attainment questions of those 25 and over, they may be missing younger Latino adults who are attending college now and will show up as college educated in the coming years.

There is not as much optimism for gains in fluency for older adults who have come in recent years to San Diego County's established immigrant communities. Not only do they have less incentive to learn, but adult English-language learning programs have been cut from state and local budgets, said Deborah Reed, an economist for the Public Policy Institute of California.

“Studies have shown that a vast majority of Spanish-language adults want to learn English,” Reed said. “But if the programs aren't there, it's going to be one of those things you put off.”

Maritza Cruz, 27, a cook at Lola's Market-Deli in Carlsbad, wants to learn more English so she doesn't have to depend on her 11-year-old son to translate. Even though Cruz emigrated from Oaxaca, Mexico, 10 years ago, she has failed to do so thus far.

She took a class once for five months and quit because “I didn't have much time,” she said, given the demands of work and family.

Now that her younger son is no longer a baby, Cruz plans to enroll in English as a Second Language classes at nearby Jefferson Elementary School next month.

Cruz and others like her face an uphill battle, experts say, because they lived for so long in an insulated immigrant community.

Olivia Rosillo calls such communities “capsules” that continue to expand and allow newcomers to exist within them.

“There are rigid boundaries,” said Rosillo, director of family therapy and social communications at the Villa Nueva Apartments, a low-income housing complex in San Ysidro. “They don't intermingle with Americans. How many people who don't speak English have American friends? They are segregated.”

That feeling of isolation has motivated young Abden Goméz to go from almost no English two years ago to the highest English language development class at San Ysidro High. He'll enroll in a standard English class next year.

After graduation Abden plans to enroll in Southwestern College and eventually become a U.S. customs agent.

“I like English, and I need it to work, because bilingual is better than one language,” he said. “It can pay more.”


Staff writers Chris Moran, Janine Zúñiga and Lola Sherman contributed to this report.

Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/education/20060815-9999-1n15speak.html