Trapped Between 2 Languages
Poor and Isolated, Many Immigrants' Children Lack English
By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 9, 2002; Page A01
William Martinez arrived in kindergarten nearly three years ago, knowing just the few words of English -- such as "happy" and "hello" -- he had picked up from TV and the playground. He was put in intensive English language classes that for decades have helped newly arriving immigrants make the transition to America.
But William is not an immigrant. He was born in Gaithersburg. And he is part of the largest and fastest-growing group of children who are learning to speak English in school throughout the Washington region: U.S. citizens.
To local officials and national experts alike, the statistic is startling. "These children are growing up in linguistically isolated households. And if they're isolated, they're probably in poor families," said Michael Fix, an immigration expert at the Urban Institute. "This is amazing. We're not talking East L.A. We're talking Montgomery County, one of the richest counties in the country."
Indeed, in Montgomery and Fairfax counties, about 35 percent of students in English for Speakers of Other Languages, or ESOL, classes are U.S. citizens, a dramatic increase from the mid-1990s. In the District, 37 percent are Americans; and in Prince George's and Arlington counties, nearly half of the children in the specialized classes are.
The statistics speak volumes: These are lives circumscribed by poverty, isolation and inattention. Many of the children spend most of their time in cramped apartments in front of TVs. Many of their parents have little or no education and work hours at low-paying jobs. Many are simply not home when their children are awake.
And most of the children do not have the extensive family networks of more established immigrant communities that can fill in the blanks.
That puts the children at a double disadvantage: Not only have they not learned English, they often don't learn their first language well.
The consequences are just beginning to hit school officials. In tests of language dominance, "quite often, it comes up that they have very small vocabulary in both languages," said Montgomery teacher Nina Klauder. Many have greater difficulty learning to read and write than do recent immigrants, even members of their own families.
The phenomenon calls into question the way schools teach English -- and whether programs designed decades ago primarily for well-educated Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro's regime need to change.
English language teachers say that many of their U.S.-born ESOL students consistently perform poorly on standardized tests, which, in this age of accountability, have become critical in rewarding or punishing teachers, schools and entire districts.
Montgomery County School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast, who promised to close the achievement gap and is instead battling flat and faltering test scores, will present a report Tuesday detailing the shortcomings of the county's ESOL program. "These are invisible kids," he said. "If we don't deal with them well, it's going to affect the quality of education for everyone."
William, now 7, is in second grade at Gaithersburg Elementary School. He now chatters in unaccented English about Britney Spears and how he loves doing the cha-cha slide in P.E. class. But the words he uses are simple, and he often pounds his forehead with his fist as he struggles to find them.
Most times, he mugs, making exaggerated faces in answer to questions.
"Another child, in another environment, would use words to express how they feel," said MariaEstela Merrell, a bilingual social worker who has been working with the boy and his family for a year. "But William just makes these funny faces."
He may sound fluent -- most children can learn to speak a foreign language, particularly "playground English," in one year. But he is struggling in school. It takes five to seven years, research has found, before a child can perform academically in a second language.
His report card shows that he is still far behind native English-speaking classmates, even after being moved into a special classroom ofonly 13 children who need extra help.
A recent language test of his ability to read and write shows why: It was as if he had never seen English. He scored azero in writing.
William and others like him present a conundrum for teachers: Children who sound fluent when they talk are anything but when it comes to reading and writing. "I was piloting a kindergarten curriculum I thought was too simple," said language teacher Jennifer DeLorge. "But then it surprised me that these kids didn't know basic words, like roof, or pants. It's tricky, because they sound quite fluent."
Much of that apparent fluency comes from watching television. And although Spanish-language TV and American cartoons may help students learn to say words or phrases, it in no way prepares them to read and write. Further, the experience leaves them passive, teachers have found, and unable to carry conversations very far in either language.
At New Hampshire Estates Elementary School in Silver Spring, 200 students are in English language classes. Only 12 are immigrants. On a recent day, a group of 4-year-olds in Head Start preschool, all born here and all struggling with the English language, dug for worms.
One boy yelled, "Ah! Ah! Ah!" His teacher, Kristina Degentesh, looked over. "You found a beetle. Say, 'I found a beetle,' " she told him. A girl pouted and pulled on her own pants. "Is too big." "What's too big?" Degentesh asked. The girl pulled again, silently, at her pants. When another boy flung dirt on others with his shovel, or when some wanted to put worms in a bucket, the children had no words in any language. They filled the air with inarticulate grunts and cries of "Heeeey."
Although there are always exceptions, teachers say they fear many of these children will reject their first language, a typical pattern of assimilation in the United States. And if their English is weak, these children risk becoming "semiliterate."
"They may have some vocabulary in one language and some vocabulary in another and use both when they speak," said Cristina Stern, a longtime ESOL teacher in Montgomery County. "But it's as if they don't have a dominant language. They're not bilingual. They're alingual."
The problem is well established in California and Texas. A 1993 survey found that one-third of the 2.1 million students learning English in U.S. public schools were born in America.
With some exceptions, these students speak their first language relatively well, in part because the immigrant communities in those states are so large, with so many extended family members, friends, churches and services in Spanish, experts say.
But in the Washington region, where the immigrant communities are smaller and dispersed, many immigrant families live not only in poverty, but also in isolation.
For years, the immigrant communities herewere highly educated and largely well-heeled. The sons and daughters of bankers, diplomats and scientists entered local public schools and learned English quickly. In a typical program, their ESOL teachers took them out of class for a half-hour a few times a week and concentrated on building words and grammar. Most performed well. Indeed, on some math tests, many outperformed native English-speaking classmates.
But in the 1980s and '90s, more than a quarter-million immigrants came to the Washington area legally, and countless others illegally. And recent studies have found that the Latino immigrants, in particular, tended to be less educated and to earn less than those in themore established Hispanic community. They complained of being trapped in thecirculo cerrado -- or closed circle -- of low-wage jobs because they didn't speak English.
Now their children are arriving in public schools. Many of those children, like William, did not go to preschool. A survey last summer found that 30 percent of Latino children in Montgomery County do not. Many, like William, have been left with babysitters in front of television sets while their parents worked, cleaning houses and offices, working construction or mopping up at Wendy's.
The largest group -- 77 percent -- speaks Spanish at home. The rest, Montgomery County records show, speak just about every language on earth.
"They're catching up their entire careers," said Francisco Millet, who directs ESOL programs in Fairfax County. "And many never do."
In truth, no one really knows just how limited these U.S.-born children are because no one has ever asked the question. Harvard University researchers are just beginning an ambitious, four-year study, in Montgomery County and elsewhere, to pinpoint whatexactly appears to put these students at greater disadvantage than not just other American children, but newly arriving immigrants as well.
Synthia Woodcock Dang has taught children from the same immigrant family, some who arrived with their parents and others who were born here. The difference was staggering.
"Even if they come from poverty in their home country, they had grandparents tell them stories and talk back and forth. They went to the market. They had rich experiences," she said. "The siblings born here don't have that. They've been left in day care with no stimulation. No one talks to them."
Isolation -- from the mainstream culture, from extended family -- is one clear cause of children's lack of English skills. And poverty is key. Indeed, in Montgomery County, 70 percent of U.S.-born children who don't speak English are poor, while only about half of foreign-born children are.
If poverty and isolation make the primary language skills weak, learning a second is not a matter of simply translating. It means learning new concepts in a strange tongue.
"What we see are children who have difficulty putting sentences together in either language," said Mathilda Arcineagas, who for 20 years has taught nonnative English speakers. "They're really between two languages."
A hammock, made of bright red, yellow and blue strands, hangs the length of the living room in William Martinez's Gaithersburg apartment. Red crayon scribbles mark the walls. Damp laundry hangs on a line across the back bedroom he shares with his pregnant mother, his father and his younger brother, Antonio, 4. An older man and his teenage son rent the other bedroom.
It is not difficult to understand how William spent the first five years of his life in a bubble of Spanish. His mother, Petrona Chavez, 34, has learned no English since coming from El Salvador in 1990. "It never occurred to me that I would learn it," she said through a translator.
Throughout the day, the TV is tuned, loudly, to a Spanish channel. The blond brick apartment complex off Diamond Avenue is known as "Little El Salvador" because everyone there speaks Spanish. And on weekends, if William goes out at all, it is to large family gatherings in Frederick, where no English is spoken and children are seen but not heard.
To shop, Petrona can go around the corner to Metro Market, where a Spanish-speaking staff can help her find flour tortillas, annatto seeds, cans of tender cactus, chipotle and 20-pound bags of rice. She goes to Mass on Sunday at St. Martin of Tours Catholic church, where in the last decade the number of Spanish-language Masses has increased from two a day to five a day.
If she needs to send money to her mother, which she has done religiously for 12 years, there are three Western Unions on Summit Avenue that advertise in Spanish.
William's father, William Sr., speaks a little English but has never studied it, figuring he can get by. He works heavy construction, operating an excavator. "I don't need much English, because I do the same job every day, and I know what to do," he said in halting English. But there are times he wishes he knew more: "When I go out to a mall or restaurant, I don't know how to order something. So I always have to eat the same thing at the same place. I go to McDonald's every day."
To understand why 7-year-old William's Spanish is limited is complicated.
His mother spent five years in first grade in a small village outside San Miguel, El Salvador.
She quit school to sell candy on the street with her mother. She learned to read a little, but she never learned to write. And she can't add. At 16, she had her first baby, followed by another. She left her husband, who gambled, and when she wasn't scrubbing the wash with a stone, she worked selling meat and picking cotton.
At that time, a brutal civil war was raging. When Petrona was 22, her father sold a cow to smuggle her and her younger brother north to safety in America. She left her children, 5 and 2, behind.
She made her way to Gaithersburg, where her older brothers had found work, and began cleaning houses during the day and office buildings at night. In 1993, she married William Sr., and they began their family. Petrona had to keep working to support the children she left behind. Almost everything she earned, $300 a month, went to El Salvador.
She was rarely home with William. And after she had Antonio, she was hospitalized with severe postpartum depression. For a year, the boys stayed with a babysitter Petrona knows only as "Senora Mexicana."
After she returned home, little changed. She worked at a Wendy's, often until 10 p.m. She worked weekends. William Sr., who has a sixth-grade education, was not much involved. Antonio did not start to speak until he was 2 1/2. At 3, he could barely put three words together in Spanish. Petrona rarely spoke to the boys except to correct them. The boys watched hours of television.
Language, any language, develops through interaction, experts say, in expressing meaningful experiences to important people. William and Antonio never had the chance.
They are not the only ones. Maria Malagon, Montgomery's director of English language programs, asked the mother of a silent child if the girl talked at home. "You'd have to ask her sister," the mother said. She is never home when the child is awake.
VyVy Pham was born in Silver Spring. At 9, she is now a soft-spoken fourth-grader at Christa McAuliffe Elementary in Germantown. And she is in her fifth year of English language classes. Most children take just two or three.
VyVy's English is limited because the only time she hears it is at school. And her Vietnamese is as limited as her mother's life was constrained by poverty.
Chi Pham, 34, an Amerasian who speaks not a word of English, has worked as a babysitter, has been on welfare and now cleans up at a nearby Roy Roger's.
VyVy's recent report card showed she is trying hard in school but often doesn't do her homework. "Please read at home!" her teacher, Jim Fritzinger, wrote. But there are no books in the spare three-bedroom townhouse the Phams share with another family. And Chi Pham can't read.
William's first-grade teacher, Greg Shinsky, is troubled that more and more children have such a small window on the world. They don't know words such as whisker or flower girl.
"When we read books," he said, "it's just painfully clear that they haven't had any experiences."
Margaret Van Buskirk, who has taught ESOL for years, describes them this way: "They're not children of the Third World," she said. "They're children of the Fourth."
In a makeshift classroom in a trailer behind William's school, Petrona Chavez sat hunched over a piece of oversize paper with wide lines, the kind that kindergartners use to write their first alphabet. And that was what Petrona was doing. In Spanish.
For the past year, Petrona has been trying to change. She has been coming to Gaithersburg Elementary's Parent Resource Center to learn how to read and write in Spanish. Teachers say that is the only way she will ever begin to learn English.
Social workers with Even Start, the federal family literacy project, have been working with her at home, encouraging her to turn the TV off, to talk to her boys, to take them to the park.
Now home because of a difficult pregnancy, she has been carefully pronouncing Spanish words for Antonio and has registered him for Head Start. She no longer pulls William out of school to be her translator. He goes to homework club. And on Fridays, she has been learning how to get down on the floor and play with Antonio.
It has not been easy.
"This is not like how it was when I grew up, where kids just crawled around on the dirt floor, and if they put something dirty in their mouths, it was okay," she said through a translator. "I'm realizing kids don't just raise themselves."
The realization came hard, last year, when William was acting up in school, using bad words on the playground and disrupting class. She had come to America for a better life, to find hope away from sadness, if not for herself, then for her children. If her luck was to change, she would have to.
"I don't want them to have the hard life that I have had," she said.
She has come far. But there is still a long way to go.
Back in their cramped apartment, Petrona began cooking rice and beans for dinner. Antonio took crayons and began to draw.
When asked which was his favorite color, Antonio quickly grabbed the red crayon.
"West!" he said emphatically.
"His favorite TV show is 'Power Rangers,' " William explained. "The red one's name is West."
Antonio raced around the room with the red crayon, proudly calling, "West! West!"
Tomorrow: A team of researchers recommends that Montgomery County overhaul its ESOL programs.