Millis Middle News

Saying 'si' to immersion:Youths in all-Spanish unit thrive

By Lisa Kocian, Globe Staff Correspondent, 10/20/2002

One by one, the seventh-graders dragged themselves to the front of the room, a parade of ponytails, braces, and ''Millis Soccer'' shirts. While their solo presentations were meant to showcase their map skills, what made this social studies class different than most was the vocabulary used.

Instead of mountains, pupils talked about montanas; instead of countries, paises.

This class was the pilot group for the Millis school system's Spanish immersion program. The pupils began together in first grade, speaking nothing but Spanish all day through every subject, and the program grew by one grade level each time they did. Plans are for the immersion to extend through the 12th grade, when these children reach their senior year.

''It's very unique to the town because we're not a bilingual town,'' said Andrew Zitoli, the Millis Middle School principal. ''Millis is kind of like Mayberry.''

Indeed, this class represents a rare opportunity in Massachusetts. Although there are similar classroom scenes that included pupils who speak Spanish as their first language, there are only a handful of programs like this one for native English speakers.

The distinction is important, because Millis is not part of the bilingual education debate. That issue has led to a November statewide ballot question seeking to require that children who don't speak English be placed in

English-only classes, rather than the existing transitional setting that allows children to learn in their native language as well.

Instead, Millis is much more likely to find itself participating in a debate over when and how foreign languages should be learned.

Last month, the state Department of Education released a report on foreign language teaching and learning across all grades, prekindergarten through Grade 12. It represents one small step toward fulfilling the goal set out in a 1996 law - to include foreign languages among the subjects tested statewide to determine high school competency.

That means foreign languages will eventually be part of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests, but not for ''several years,'' according to Susan Wheltle. The reason for the wait is largely financial.

''The difficulty the department has right now is our staffing has been cut,'' she said. ''We don't have the foreign language specialists to carry out the work.''

Even so, last month's report included a plan of action to lay a foundation for eventual statewide assessment of foreign language proficiency. It calls for establishing an ad hoc advisory committee made up of foreign language department heads from around the state, who will look at, among other things, existing tests and how to assess proficiency beginning at the high school level.

These plans are what inspired the Millis immersion program. When Superintendent Caroline White arrived in 1995, the state was talking about testing beginning in the fourth grade. Millis had no foreign language program at the time.

By the next school year, beginning in 1996, the pilot group was in the first grade and pupils spent their entire day speaking Spanish, the language chosen by parents as the most useful, White said.

Now, some first- and second-graders are instructed entirely in Spanish. The rest of the grade levels spend half a day in Spanish and half in English. About 20 percent of the pupils in each grade - 1 through 7 - are enrolled in the immersion program.

White said the immersion pupils do just as well on the MCAS - even on the third-grade reading test, where they might be expected to falter after two years of Spanish-only instruction.

''Reading is a transferrable skill,'' she explained.

Although the School Department looks at the scores on MCAS and other tests to make sure that immersion students aren't struggling because of their bilingual instruction, White said she would not release scores for fear of pitting one group against another.

That has been a concern among parents, not specifically on test scores, but in general that immersion pupils would be cut off socially from the rest of the children.

The immersion program was one reason Carol Baker and her family moved to Millis.

She said she almost changed her mind a couple of days before enrolling her son David, who is now in the sixth grade, in the program. Now all three of her children are in the immersion program.

Baker said that while she was concerned about the potential for the pupils to be isolated, much to her relief the school addressed that by making sure they have plenty of chances to mix.

The one subject where immersion students might be expected to lag behind, according to research, is spelling, White said, but she added, ''I think that's a very small tradeoff for having fluency in another language.''

Millis has done no formal testing to assess what level of proficiency the pupils have attained in Spanish, but officials say anecdotal evidence shows that even the young children have gone well beyond the average high school Spanish student.

Starting so young, they can develop ''a near-native fluency,'' said Yvonne McArthur, a third-grade teacher who grew up in South America with a mother from Cuba. ''I speak to them very quickly just like I would if I were in Cuba, and they understand me. And they speak to me very quickly and they don't have an English accent at all.''
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Lisa Kocian can be reached at 508-820-4231 or lkocian@globe.com.

This story ran on page W1 of the Globe West section on 10/20/2002.
 

"The teachers are very good in the sense that they've accepted larger class sizes," Lynch said. "They're doing all they can do, and that is to just continue to teach."

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