Schoolkids see success in learning English

One morning this fall, Midori Tanaka led her kindergarten students at Van Asselt Elementary through a chant:

Spider here, spider there

Spider, spider everywhere

Fast spider running quickly

Fuzzy spider eating slowly

Long spider searching carefully

And cute spider listening quickly.

Tanaka wanted her students to get accustomed to the sentence pattern — adjective, noun, verb, adverb — in the chant. The kindergartners enunciated the words and phrases so clearly that a visitor wouldn't guess that almost all of them speak primarily Vietnamese, Chinese or Spanish at home.

The South Seattle school offers a snapshot of how, over the past three years, Washington's urban and rural schools are changing the way they teach students who don't speak English.

The state supports 78,000 students whose primary language isn't English and whose limited English proficiency makes them eligible for state-funded translators and other services.

For the first time, state officials say, more of these students are being taught in classrooms with native-English-speaking students rather than being separated into classrooms for limited-English speakers.

Margaret Ho, interim director of the state's Office of Migrant and Bilingual Education, says Van Asselt's success with a new approach called Project GLAD may have contributed to the shift in how these students are taught.

In 2003, Van Asselt, which enrolls the most elementary-age limited-English speakers in the district — more than half of the school's enrollment — became the first Seattle school to train its staff in Project GLAD, which stands for "guided language acquisition design."

GLAD provides educators with a framework, such as chants, "inquiry charts" or photo collages, for teaching language and content simultaneously. Students listen, speak, read and write in all subject areas, and teachers deliver thematic units that blend lessons in science, social studies and literature.

The GLAD model is based on brain research showing that children acquire language more effectively when they understand the purpose and joy of reading before being asked to study its mechanics.

GLAD seemed to work

Van Asselt teachers used the GLAD model, and it seemed to work. About half of the fourth-grade limited-English speakers passed the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) reading test in 2004 and about 42 percent last year. From 2001 to 2003, about 15 percent of the limited-English speakers at Van Asselt passed the reading test annually.

"When people saw the Van Asselt scores published in the paper, they were very interested" in GLAD, Ho said.

School districts took notice because limited-English-speaking students who don't become proficient in the language before fourth grade are at greater risk of failing the writing-intensive WASL, as well as the Washington Language Proficiency Test (WLPT), which they take annually.

Nancy Burke, who monitors the English proficiency of limited-English-speaking students in Seattle Public Schools, calls the WLPT the "poor relative of the WASL," because it, too, is a high-stakes exam, but few people know about it. Students who pass the test no longer qualify for state-funded bilingual services and are deemed "graduates" of the program; those who fail must continue to receive tutoring in their native language.

In Seattle, fewer than 10 percent of students taking the language-proficiency test at Emerson, Brighton, Hawthorne, High Point and Thurgood Marshall elementary schools passed last year, records show.

Pass rates at elementaries where teachers were following the GLAD program were significantly higher: 19 percent at Wing Luke, 25 percent at Van Asselt and 25 percent at Kimball. These schools have the most limited-English-speaking students in the district.

"My vision is to see every teacher in Seattle be trained in GLAD," Burke said.

That dream may have to wait. A high-powered committee of community leaders appointed by Seattle schools Superintendent Raj Manhas has found that Seattle spends significantly more per student on educating limited-English-speaking students than other large districts in the Puget Sound region.

The committee, which will address bilingual funding in its final report, suggested that all administrative money for teacher training be redirected until the district develops a more rigorous process for evaluating the effectiveness of these investments.

About 450 of the district's 2,700 teachers have been trained in GLAD so far. Instead of spending more on expensive outside trainers, the district is helping seven teachers become certified GLAD trainers.

"Helps children learn"

Wing Luke teacher Teresa Boone is one of them. Having studied speech pathology and taught for nearly 30 years, the native Texan spent the past nine years in Seattle teaching immigrant children. Boone is giddy about GLAD.

"I wish that I would have had it 20 years ago," said Boone, who teaches first and second grade. "It helps children learn."

Wing Luke's pass rates on the WASL doubled last year after the school staff began using GLAD strategies. The percentage of limited-English-speaking students meeting standard in reading jumped from 33 to 64 percent, in writing from 28 to 64 percent, and in math from 18 to 55 percent.

Ellen Punyon, the school's principal, said her teachers underwent GLAD training in 2003-04 after hearing about it from Van Asselt staff. She saw it as a way to build the vocabulary of non-English-speaking students quickly.

For example, some don't know what movies or suspenders are. While showing students what these common items are, the GLAD approach also honors their cultural knowledge.

"They have information we never test them on," she said.

The most important reason GLAD works for all children, Boone said, is that it inundates kids with high-level vocabulary and content and then fosters a learning environment where kids feel safe asking questions aloud about what interests them.

The classroom's "living wall" is chock-full of sentences, pictorials, chants and grids of information "dripping with language," as some GLAD teachers put it.

One day last month, Boone presented a unit on temperate rain forests to third- and fourth-grade students. She and three other teachers spent weeks developing the unit, which condenses into one month what some teachers cover in a whole semester.

"A lot of teachers feel that it's a lot of work," Boone said, when asked why more teachers hadn't embraced the GLAD model.

She jotted on a flip chart what students said they knew about rain forests ("It's really hot inside") and what they wanted to know ("If you are on top of a tree, if it's really two stories high.").

She let them touch and examine objects they might find in rain forests, including a banana slug, bark from a Sitka spruce and curly heron's-bill moss.

She introduced advanced vocabulary, such as "mollusk," "hermaphrodite" and "dendrologist" through chants about slugs and salmon.

"I did an angel!"

By last month, the Van Asselt kindergartners who two months earlier were memorizing a spider chant had plastered Tanaka's classroom with construction-paper spiders (the "cephalothorax" was labeled) and were learning the difference between a long "a" ("angel") and short "a" ("apple").

The weather forecast called for snow.

"I see a snow angel," Tanaka told the children, reading to them the sentence of the day. They repeated it after her.

On an overhead projector, Tanaka showed the children how to draw a snow angel and how to write the letter "a." She asked her students to do the same.

Arjay Rosaldo stared intently at Tanaka's drawing, looked down at his paper and put his pencil to work.

"I did it," he exclaimed minutes later. "I did an angel!"

The bell rang for recess. Snow began to fall.

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com