My family and I are just coming back from my daughters’ Multicultural
Festival at their preschool. Both of
them are attending Puerta Abierta (Open Door) and both of them danced in the
festival. It was a blast! We were first hand witnesses and participants of a
celebration of life by a community of happy, engaged committed individuals
supporting an educational approach. Puerta Abierta is a successful, popular,
notorious Bilingual- Spanish immersion preschool in Illinois. I choose Puerta
Abierta preschool for my observations for this course because of their
prominent and well known Bilingual Spanish Immersion program. In this type of
program you try to create a balanced class consisting of half of students that
speak the dominant language, in this case English, and half of students that
speak a minority language, in this case Spanish. Then, you immerse the
English-dominant students into the second language’s instruction and gradually
transition them into the dominant language. The outcomes of using this approach
have been phenomenal, there are scores of research based studies pointing to the
tremendous benefits of this approach on all
students. Furthermore, I selected Puerta Abierta because my wife
enrolled our two youngest daughters in their program, she speaks wonders of it,
and I wanted to see it with my own eyes. According to the scholar research on
programs’ effectiveness, this approach has proven to be the most effective in
educating second language learners, especially the Hispanics in the U.S., which
is the focus of my doctoral studies. I wanted to see it first hand, in
practice, and it entirely exceeded my expectations.
It is essential
to note that the ways on which children exhibit development in specific domains
such as physical, cognitive and social emotional are similar to the ones
observed in other equally effective programs: toddlers are actively exploring
with language and the environment; they exhibit separation anxiety; their
dramatic play is incipient...etc. Even
the classroom environment and the physical arrangement is very similar. What
really stands out is the use of language in the classroom. This was one of the
questions during the interviews to the teachers: What language do you use for
instruction and why? This was the answer: “Ninety percent of the time we use
Spanish and ten percent English. The purpose of the massive use of Spanish is
to teach a second language, in context, to the English speaking students and to
enrich and expand the language of the Spanish speaking students. We use English
ten percent of the time to ensure understanding and to clarify some linguistic
misunderstandings.” In the toddlers’ classroom, half of the English speaking
students communicate with the teachers in Spanish and the rest in English but
the teachers responded in Spanish most of the time. All the teachers speak both
languages fluently. In the preschool classroom most of the students communicate
with the teachers in Spanish which expresses high levels of bilingualism by the
second year in the program.
The Puerta
Abierta program by itself is remarkable, long waiting lists, hundreds of
bilingual students and 17 successful years can attest for it. I successfully used
a similar approach in my Bilingual Transitional Kindergarten classroom for
years. The difference was the ratio of language use. Due to the transitional
nature of the program, I used 65% Spanish and 35% English and by the end of the
school year most students were reading in both languages. This year the system
mandated the implementation of an English immersion program for all English
Language learners, according to them, to meet the linguistic demands of the new
assessments, and the results have been disappointing qualitative and
quantitative.
Generally
speaking, observing this program was absolutely useful in enhancing my
understanding related to child development in the early years for each age group,
but it was particularly useful in enhancing my understanding of the benefits of
this approach in the education of all children. After all, maybe the benefits
of a bilingual education is the reason affluent people pay large sums so their
children can learn another language.
I would like to
bring to your attention some of the most significant insights gained as a result
of my experience with Puerta Abierta.
1)
The ways on which children in a Bilingual
Program exhibit development in specific domains such as physical, cognitive and
social emotional are similar to the ones observed in equally effective monolingual
programs.
2)
In
Bilingual immersion programs all students feel proud of their use of language.
English dominant children are proud of showing that they speak another language
and Hispanic student feel proud and empowered because their language is the
mean of instruction and is valued in the school.
3)
This
program works. I know that plenty of the children graduated from this preschool
continue their studies in bilingual schools and become fluent bilingual
children. My 4 year old daughter is fluently bilingual from her first year in
Puerta Abierta. My wife and I purposefully only spoke to her in Spanish the
first three years of her life, we knew that she was going to learn English in
school. After one year in Puerta Abierta she became fluent in English just by
interacting with the English dominant children at Puerta.
As a consequence of
these observation I am planning to advocate for the re-integration and
implementation of a Bilingual program in our school. I hope I was able to share
new insights about Bilingual education to you through this assignment. Thanks
for reading it! Comments/questions are welcome!