Bridging language barriers
How schools can ease the transition for Latino immigrant students.
The United States has the largest number of Spanish speakers in the world except for Mexico. Approximately 40 million people talk, think, do business, dream and play in Spanish. This demographic shift is especially transforming the American South. For example, the recent arrival of approximately half a million new immigrants in North Carolina alone, mostly Latin American-born, is also bringing a new culture and language to a region whose population has remained relatively stable over the last half century when compared with major centers of immigration in the United States.
Public schools in southern states are particularly being affected. With the sizeable number of new immigrants arriving since the 1990s through traditional gateways of immigration as well as new gateways within the United States, the lack of resources to teach large numbers of students whose home language is Spanish has reached a critical stage.
The public debate on the use of languages other than English in public schools has a long history. Among the most critical events in this history going back for more than a century were the steps taken to guarantee equality in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which opened the way to equal participation in public shools without affirming the right of minority groups to their own culture, and the Bilingual Education Act in 1968, which provided supplemental funding for school districts to teach students whose first language was not English.
Today, the achievement gap between White and Latino students and the rising dropout rates of the latter group are issues of intense public debate. According to the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans (http://www.yic.gov/) (2003), Latino students now represent the fastest growing group of children in public schools across the United States (Risk to Opportunity, 2003). Their plight brings us back to the equality guarantees of Brown v. Board of Education, a decision that opened the way to equal participation in public schools without affirming the right of minority groups to their own culture. The incorporation of larger numbers of Spanish-speaking students into English-only schools disadvantages these students and labels them as a minority group outside the dominant cultural group.
Culture, language and identity are closely connected in the schooling and academic development of a growing number of children in American schools. Without doubt, the rapid change in demographics in the American South has caught educators and schools administrators off guard. They often lack the necessary training and resources to provide adequate teaching and learning to a rapidly increasing number of young people who arrive to school ill-prepared for an immersion in English-only schools.
Schools are not the only public service institutions facing this dilemma. All service professions are facing similar situations. All service professions are dealing with similar situations. But some professions, such as those in the health field, have responded more effectively to the need.
Several initiatives developed by the School of Public Health and the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill may help public schools communicate more effectively with Spanish-speaking students and their families.
Language and cultural learning initiatives
Health care professionals have developed three different initiatives to increase health care providers’ understanding and level of comfort with the Latino population. The rationale of these initiatives is simply that health professionals need basic cultural and language training to be able to address the health care needs of the Latino community.
The first initiative provides intense language training. Workshops help health care professional achieve fluency in Spanish at the functional level, and promote cultural awareness to strengthen communication skills, knowledge of basic health vocabulary, and practical grammar “intended to improve access and promote quality care for Latino immigrants” (Bender, 2004, p. 199).
Building upon the foundation of initial fluency and cultural awareness, a second initiative developed by health professionals is ¡A su Salud!--meaning “To your Health!” This is a Spanish language curriculum for practicing health professionals. A soap opera that includes an intermediate Spanish course and cultural awareness sketches is a result of collaboration between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Yale University. The objective of the soap opera is to promote cultural competence in Spanish as well as cultural appreciation of the Latino community, specifically targeted toward situations that involve health care issues.
A third initiative along the same objectives is a workshop designed to show health professionals photographs of the homes and living conditions of the Latino community. Taken by Latinas in their own communities, the photographs show people, places and situations that are significant in their daily lives. The purpose of the workshop is to show health professionals to see the similarities in living conditions with other groups and reduce their discomfort when they encounter Latinos in their practice. Bender and Castro (2000) in the School of Public Health at UNC-Chapel Hill reported that health professional tense up when they interact with Latino patients, they project frustration onto the patients, and as a result their patients feel uncomfortable and experience a sense of rejection. By attending workshops, talking about Latino families, and understanding the complex networks of social support that help immigrant women remain healthy in spite of disadvantaged situations in the host country, health professionals feel more relaxed and they can act with greater knowledge and success when approaching their patients.
All the strategies described above are examples of health professionals’ efforts to bridge language barriers. Similar programs should be implemented in schools to provide access and quality education to the growing number of Latinos students. To a large extent, the achievement gap and the large number of students dropping out can be explained by the social isolation and rejection that Latino student perceive when entering unwelcoming environments.
English-only programs in schools, accompanied by a lack of cultural and language sensitivity training for teachers and other school personnel, renders much more difficult the communication with families and students. This kind of neglect for the cultural resources of the immigrant population forces students into rapid and ineffective acculturation that leads to negative social behavior. Inasmuch as such acculturation strives to break the student’s ties to the Latino community, it leads to problems in identity formation and development that can result in serious mental health issues (Bacallao and Smokowski forthcoming).
Educators and researchers from many disciplines have pointing out the need to implement language programs in schools to facilitate the acculturation of students to their new environment. This strategy is particularly important for young women and men who enter the school system in the United States after finishing their elementary school in another country. For students entering schools after finishing middle school in their home country, the transition to high school in the United States is especially difficult.
One example of Mexican immigrant students
A study of Mexican immigrant students in New York City shows that the educational backgrounds of student and their families possess upon arriving to the United States greatly influence the their possibility of completing school and their integration into their new society (Cortina and Gendreau, 2003). In the specific case of Mexican-born students from rural areas who arrive to the United States in or before ninth grade, they have great difficulty graduating from high school. Out of 490 students followed using administrative data from the New York City School system, only 22 percent graduated from High School after four years. In the specific case of New York City, students can continue to be enrolled for seven years, and at the end of that period the number of students who graduated rose to 34% (Cortina and Rosenbaum, forthcoming).
The New York study and many other research studies show that the low probability of recently arrived Mexican students graduating is related to different factors. Chief among those factors is their living in families where Spanish is the language of the home and no member of the family speaks English. Moreover, number of years in English as a second language classes also increases their probability of not finishing high school because of the lack of academic content courses that they are able to take while in ESL classes. Finally, the time of immigration is another crucial factor to explain graduation rates. That is, the closer the students who arrive to the United States are to entering ninth grade, the lower their probability of graduating from high school.
Immigration is the main explanation for the burgeoning growth of Latino students in public schools and also their low levels of academic performance in the receiving schools. Situations similar to the one just described for New York are common in many rural and urban school districts. Latino students are entering high schools without the levels of English proficiency they need to graduate, although in many cases they arrive with the necessary academic training to perform adequately if appropriate support and language training could be provided. That determination is shown poignantly by data from the New York City Public Schools (http://www.nycenet.edu/default.aspx), which reveals that against all odds; 7% of the Mexican-born students were able to graduate on time and with a Regents’ Diploma. For this prestigious diploma, they had to score above the 85th percentile on the statewide Regents’ exams in math and English (Cortina and Rosenbaum, forthcoming).
Culture, language and identity
Following the example of the health professions, public schools need to expand professional development to instill in teachers and other educators the crucially needed understanding of language, culture and identity of their newly arrived Latino population. In an effort to provide readily available assistance to teachers and other school personnel, the School of Education of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2005) published a CD containing The Handbook for Educators Who Work with Children of Mexican Origin. This handbook is designed to assist school administrators, school board members, teachers, counselors and social workers how to better address the learning needs of Latino children and young adults in their schools. Moreover, the handbook provides information about the educational system in Mexico and facilitates the grade placement and grade equivalence between the United States and Mexican schools.
Migration is changing the United States. A veritable Latinization of America is taking place in the movies, in food, and in the pop culture. Yet at the same time, thousands of Latino students are being pushed out of schools because of instruction in a language they minimally understand. There is a pressing need for all teachers to learn more about second language acquisition and cross-cultural teaching and learning, and it is imperative that we address the critical shortage of teachers with knowledge to teach English as a Second Language in new immigration areas.
The challenge for public school professionals is to contribute more effectively to achieving the dream of 40 million people of Latin American descent in the United States who are hungry for greater educational opportunities. No greater service could be provided along those lines than to prepare teachers, administrators and other professionals to educate children in a multicultural and multilingual way. All children will be bettered prepared for an increasing globalization of economies and interdependent world as adults.
References
¡A su Salud! Spanish for Health Professionals. Yale University Press, forthcoming.
Bacallao, M. L. and Smokowski, Paul R. (2005). “Entre dos Mundos” (Between Two Worlds): Bicultural Skill Training with Latino Immigrants Families,” Journal of Family Prevention, forthcoming.
Bender, D. E., et al (2004). “Improving Access for Latino Immigrants: Evaluation of Language Training Adapted to Needs of Health Professionals,” Journal of Immigrant Health 6 (4): 197-209.
Bender, D. E. and Castro, D. (2000). “Explaining the Birth Weight Paradox: Latina Immigrants’ Perceptions of Resilience and Risk,” Journal of Immigrant Health 2 (3): 155-173.
Cortina, R. and Rosenbaum, E. (2005). “No Latino Child Left Behind?
Policy Suggestions to Improve Outcomes,” forthcoming in Gary Orfield, ed., Harvard University: The Civil Rights Project.
Cortina, R. and Gendreau, M. (2003). Immigrants and Schooling: Mexicans in New York, New York. Center for Migration Studies.
Final Report of the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans, (March 31, 2003) in Risk to Opportunity: Fulfilling the Educational Needs of Hispanics Americans: The 21st Century.
UNC-Chapel Hill, School of Education (2005). The Handbook for Educators Who Work with Children of Mexican Origin.
