Los Puentes is a Spanish-English language immersion program at Snow Hill Primary School created by ECU professors and Greene County Public Schools. English Professor Lida Dutkova-Cope (right) conducts preliminary linguistic research with kindergartner Antonio Skillicorn. (Photo by Forrest Croce)

Team Builds 'Bridges' Through Language Immersion

By Erica Plouffe

For the parents of 40 Snow Hill Primary kindergartners, Los Puentes is a way their children can become proficient in both English and Spanish by the time they leave elementary school.

For the team of East Carolina University professors who developed the dual-language immersion program, Los Puentes, or Bridges, is a creative approach to embrace the region's growing Spanish-speaking population and a new way to bring multiculturalism into the classroom.

"ECU has had a working relationship with Greene County Schools and I've been very interested in Latino transmigration patterns," Rebecca Torres, an ECU geography professor, said. "I'm interested in their level of connectivity in the community and their networks back home."

Torres' interest in migratory trends led her to consider the effects of North Carolina's recent Hispanic population boom and how it reshapes the classroom.

"We approached the school system about doing research with them. We wanted to approach it, not just as an applied research project but also as something that could actually do something to help the school," she said.

Last summer, Torres, whose son is a student in the classroom, received the support of Snow Hill parents and administrators as well as the Greene County School District. Armed with $65,000 in seed money from a Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation of Winston-Salem grant, the program was launched with the opening of school in August.

From 1990 to 2000, U.S. Census figures show North Carolina saw a 394 percent increase in its Hispanic population. While diverse populations are typically considered to be an urban phenomenon, this is not the case in North Carolina. Greene County, one of Eastern North Carolina's many rural counties, saw an 800 percent increase in its Hispanic population in the same 10-year span. More than 20 percent of Greene County Schools' students are Hispanic.

"Programs like this have been running in urban areas, but it's not been looked at with rural schools and the challenges they have there," said Torres.

The Snow Hill project is the first rural school to offer Spanish-English immersion classrooms, and the third in the state, after Raleigh and Chapel Hill school districts, she said. Throughout their entire elementary school education, the children will have two classrooms (a Spanish and an English classroom) and have two teachers.

Three months into Los Puentes and already the children in Maria Elena Castaño's kindergarten class at Snow Hill Primary are speaking and learning in Spanish. For some of them, it's the language they know best. For others, Spanish is a whole new language. Castaño, who taught primary school in her native Colombia for more than a decade, said she is excited to be a part of such an innovative program.

"I enjoy this class and I love teaching the children. I am very surprised, listening to them. Everyone is learning very fast," she said. Dozens of grant-funded Spanish-language children's books, as well as posters, the days of the week and other learning materials help Castaño provide students with a true immersion in the Spanish language.

Snow Hill kindergarten teacher Stephanie Cain, who coordinates the program at the school and leads the English immersion classroom, believes Los Puentes serves as a way to introduce new learning strategies for children.

"I wanted to find new ways to reach students. I tend to migrate toward children when I see there's a need. And I do see a need here," said Cain, whose child is also in the program.

"It's so important these days for children to be bi-literate. As a teacher, you are often wondering if what you're doing will work. As a parent, to have a child in the class who shows it works is great. He really enjoys it," she said.

While children are going about their business, learning their lessons and reading and writing in English one day and in Spanish the next, how they learn and how they are taught are of great interest to a variety of ECU researchers.

The researchers, whose disciplines range from geography to education to linguistics, are pooling their research to develop academic models that could someday work in other rural schools across the state.

While making social and cultural connections are important to this project, researchers believe a key component has to do with providing sound educational strategies for all students. The influx of non-English native speakers, coupled with the demands of the federal No Child Left Behind Act that all children in up to nine demographic groupings pass a standardized test pose significant financial challenges for many small, rural school districts. The multi-disciplinary approach taken by Los Puentes is what researchers hope will serve as a successful model that could be implemented in other school districts across the state.

"How can we improve what we're doing with second language learners? Right now, we have English as a Second Language pull-out models," said Lida Dutkova-Cope, ECU linguistics professor. "Also, English-speaking parents are excited about having their children learn Spanish." A waiting list long enough to fill another classroom exists at the primary school. Initially, 67 children were signed up for the 40 seats in the classroom, say researchers.

Kindergarten teacher Maria Elena Castaño, Spanish language immersion instructor, has a little help from a student with her lesson on occupations. (Photo by Forrest Croce)

Dutkova-Cope hopes to track learning patterns through the use of body microphones on several students in the class. The parents of these students have agreed to allow their children to be recorded for research purposes.

While ECU linguistics professors Dutkova-Cope and Ahmar Mahboob are interested in gauging in how children inte-grate their Spanish and English lessons during classroom and free time, College of Education professor Mark L'Esperance is considering how to prepare future teachers for this type of classroom.

Torres, along with fellow ECU geographers Holly Hapke and Jeff Popke, are conducting interviews with Spanish-speaking parents at home to glean information on migration patterns.

Marcela Ruiz-Funes, ECU professor of Spanish, just joined the already diverse research group and plans to look at bilingual education and its connections to linguistics.

"Through the process, it fits in with what Mark is doing, and what has evolved is other faculty on campus realized they have a lot to contribute but they also have a lot to gain by getting involved," Torres said.

L'Esperance, who is also the director of ECU's Rural Education Institute, said he is fascinated by the language immersion program, not only because it helps address an issue facing most rural schools, but because it involves so many different players at ECU and in the community.

"This fits the vision of ECU," he said. "We've identified a specific area of concern in the region and now, how do we create an interdisciplinary plan, put it in place and find a best practice to replicate it?"

From Pieces of Eight, Nov. 3, 2003 (complete issue available at http://www.news.ecu.edu/poe/1103/arch1103.htm)