Deseret Morning News, Monday, July 11, 2005

Speak easy: Children become bilingual at a young age

By Lezlee E. Whiting
For the Deseret Morning News

One day when Sabrina McKee was 4 years old, her father spoke to her in English. It amuses her to tell the story of that day. She especially likes to tell it to parents who are raising their children to be bilingual.

Eden Rose, left, Mysharleigh Savas and Allie Rasmussen
listen to teacher Vicky Lowe read "Hansel and Gretel" in Spanish.
Tyler Sipe, Deseret Morning News

She had been in the kitchen of their Provo home, eating pudding. She had goo around her mouth as she walked into the living room where her father sat, talking to some guests. He spied her and said, "Sabrina, bring me a wet washcloth so I can clean your face."

Sabrina ignored him. She walked through the room with her head held high, like a filthy-faced princess. She walked straight out the door. Suddenly, her father realized that she didn't know he was talking to her because he wasn't speaking Spanish.

Sabrina's father, Trevor McKee, was an expert on how humans learn language. He was a professor of linguistics and child development at Brigham Young University and started the International Language Programs.

He had learned to speak Spanish on an LDS mission to Argentina. After he came home and married and had five children, he wrote his doctoral thesis on his various attempts to teach his babies to speak Spanish.

With his second youngest child, McKee had good success by speaking Spanish to her during daily "fun" times. Stories, songs and games were done in Spanish, and Sabrina's sister picked up the language without effort.

With Sabrina, the youngest, McKee tried something different. From the day she was born, he spoke to her only in Spanish while her mother, Marian, spoke to her only in English. Like her sister, Sabrina also spoke two languages from the time she could speak. Her father gradually modified her instruction until he was speaking Spanish to her every other day. Then he got to the point where they would speak Spanish only during occasional fun projects, as he had done with her older sister.

By the time Sabrina was in junior high, and could take Spanish at school and learn the more formal rules of grammar, the entire McKee family spoke English at home. But by then, Sabrina was fluent in both languages.

Teacher Maria Reynosa reads to preschoolers in Spanish at
McKee Spanish Language School in Salt Lake City.
Tyler Sipe, Deseret Morning News

Today, Sabrina McKee is the director of the preschool that her father started several years ago before his death. The McKee Spanish Language School in Salt Lake City has about 44 students and is one of a growing number of resources for parents who want to help their children learn a second language at a young age.

Given the fact that Utah has the highest percentage of bilingual parents of any state (due, no doubt, to the number of Utahns who serve LDS missions), it seems fair to assume that there is a general interest in raising children to be bilingual. And yet, compared to other states, Utah has a relatively low number of bilingual public schools.

How sad that is, says Mary Lou Oland-Wong. "Because being bilingual is such a gift." Oland-Wong teaches in one of the few bilingual elementary classrooms in the state, Salt Lake's Jackson Elementary. She didn't learn to speak Spanish until she was 28, she explains, and knowing Spanish changed her life. It was as if a part of her brain was finally full, she says. Maybe a part of her heart, as well. When she got married she told her husband, Steve, that they would have to raise their children to speak Spanish.

Oland-Wong knows some families who do what she calls a "geographical" program. If both parents speak a language other than English then they can speak Spanish (or Tongan or French or Greek) in the home and English outside the house. And their children will grow up bilingual.

But in her case, because her husband didn't speak Spanish, Oland-Wong had to be the one to speak Spanish to the children, while he spoke English. She likes the two-parent/two-language approach anyway, she says. She had read about it when she was pregnant with her oldest child, Natasha. (Oland-Wong recommends books by Nancy Cloud, Fred Genesee and Else Hamayan.)

BYU early childhood professor Byran Korth just got back from Guatemala where he had been helping design school curricula. In Guatemala, as in many countries, children are expect to be bilingual, he notes. English is a regular part of the classroom instruction, from preschool on up.

Jose Rodriguez, front, watches as students leave the
McKee Spanish Language School. The school immerses
children in the Spanish language.
Tyler Sipe, Deseret Morning News

A child's ability to learn multiple languages at a young age has been well documented, says Korth. "The way to do it is to immerse them," he says.

He offers several words of caution to parents who are looking for a preschool where their child could learn a second language, or who want to teach their children themselves. Children need a "home" language, he says. That can mean speaking one language at home and another at school, or one language with mom and another with the nanny. As they go back and forth between two languages, they need to be able to speak one at a time and not mix words from two languages into one sentence.

When selecting a preschool, check out the guidelines of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (naeyc.org), Korth suggests. A good preschool will focus on the needs of the whole child, not just on language.

Meanwhile, at libraries across the state, there are more and more resources for parents — especially for parents who want to teach their children Spanish. In Provo, at the Academy Square Library, Hispanic outreach coordinator Emily Edman says they never buy a Disney movie in English that they don't also buy in Spanish.

The weekly bilingual story hour often draws 25 families, she says. Usually about one-third of those families are not native-Spanish speakers. A few, she surmises, are headed by parents who don't speak Spanish at all but who are trying to expose their children to a second language. Even if you don't have a second language yourself, librarians can help you find tapes of songs and stories and help you give your toddlers a start on being bilingual.

At Salt Lake's Day-Riverside Library, the bilingual story hour brings out children as old as 12, says library assistant Gracie Mora. She encourages older children to read to the younger ones, always choosing a native-English speaker to read the Spanish paragraphs and a native-Spanish speaker to read in English.

Mora herself learned English by immersion. When she was 10, her family moved from Mexico to Texas and she went to fourth grade with a teacher who understood her Spanish but who spoke only English back to her. By fifth grade, Mora knew English.

So when it came to raising her own children, Mora did not hesitate to immerse them in two languages at once. She spoke to them in Spanish for a time each day, and then in English. If she was talking to them about something important, she would say it twice, once in each language. She didn't want them to use their favorite excuse for not doing what she asked, i.e. "You said it in English and I didn't understand," or "You said it in Spanish and I didn't understand."

As for Sabrina McKee, she wonders if children start to rebel a bit once they get into public school and realize that other children are speaking English at home. She can't exactly remember preferring to speak English to her father, but she thinks she may have gone through such a phase.

Meanwhile, for the children who have been through her preschool and who do want to keep up on their Spanish, McKee offers after-school programs as well as a summer school. This summer her classes contain older children who are fluent in Spanish, as well as a couple of preschoolers who had never heard a word of Spanish until they came through her door and were no longer allowed to speak a word of English.

One recent afternoon it was possible to observe a little boy who had been at the McKee school for only two days. He sat at a table with five or six other preschoolers, cutting out a paper star. "Is this a star," his teacher asked him, in Spanish, trying to get him to say a complete sentence. The other children all answered "Yes, this is a star," but the most she could get from the new fellow was, "Si."

Still, it was impressive that he seemed to know what she was asking and knew that "yes" was the correct answer to her question.

Later, the teacher got out a huge bin of Legos. She passed out the blocks to children who asked for them correctly. "I want three small yellow blocks," said one boy, in Spanish. "I want two big green ones," said another.

When it was the new boy's turn to ask for blocks, he did amazingly well, asking for a big red and also a big blue. He seemed proud after the teacher passed him the blocks he'd asked for.

Yet he didn't seem proud because he was learning a new language, necessarily. Spanish seemed to be just a part of this place to him. Rather he seemed proud because he liked what he was building. After he added the rojo and azul to his stack of blocks, he held out his Lego tower, so that the other children could admire it.

E-MAIL: susan@desnews.com