For a dozen years, the nearly 150 Spanish immersion students at Orem's Windsor Elementary School have been going places with their foreign-language studies. This week, their classmates get to share the experience.
On Monday, elementary schools throughout the state - Windsor included - celebrated Foreign Language in the Elementary School Day, and the week has been proclaimed Utah State Foreign Language Week by Gov. Mike Leavitt.Windsor has been transformed into an international mixture of languages and cultures for the week. Flags representing many nations line the halls. Announcements given over the school's public-address system are spoken in different languages each day. School-lunch menus include fare from different countries. And displays, pictures and words decorate the school's interior, showing the variety of geography, cultures and languages from around the world.
"We wanted our entire student body to gain an interest in all foreign languages and cultures," said Ruth King, a fifth- and sixth-grade Spanish immersion teacher who organized Windsor's foreign language celebration week. "We feel that we can help spark interest in learning foreign languages, understanding and accepting other cultures and help prepare our stu-dents for life in a global com-mun-ity at an early age."
But Windsor Elementary's immersion students still get the highest concentration of the foreign language studies by far. The school is one of only four Spanish immersion elementary schools in the state of Utah. Those four schools - Windsor, Cherry Hill and Northridge in Orem and Meadow in Lehi - are all located in the Alpine School District, which is one of only 40 districts nationwide with immersion programs at the elementary-school level.
One class out of each grade level at the school is selected to be an immersion class. In those classes, students who speak English as their native language are placed in classrooms where the core curriculum of mathematics, language and writing is taught in a foreign language - in Windsor's case, Spanish. Windsor's Spanish immersion students, who begin in first grade, are taught to read and write in Spanish before they study English in the third grade.
"It's kind of like `Hooked on Phonics' but using Spanish, but it makes reading and writing in English even easier," said Jake Rossean, one of King's fifth-graders.
Deanna Taylor, who teaches a second-grade immersion class at Windsor, agreed and said the only mistakes her students usually make are typical mistakes that would be made by students who speak Spanish as their native language.
"They have such great accents," Taylor said. "And by learning in another language, they're learning language structures that make learning English easier, as well as learning another language on top of Spanish."
Jeremy Larsen, another member of King's fifth-grade immersion class, said the program is surprisingly enjoyable.
"My sister said she's kind of glad she wasn't in the immersion program because she thinks it looks hard," he said. "But it's not. It's fun."
Steve Cherrington, Windsor's principal, said he is a steadfast supporter of the program, having put some of his own children through it.
"This is an outstanding program," Cherrington said. "We're taking first-graders, who have no other schooling, and teach them to accept that this is what school is all about. But that's good because they don't have any pre-formed ideas about not being able to speak another language."
By the time King's fifth-graders complete their Spanish-language studies, they are able to read the language at a third-year college level. Alpine district students who take follow-up Spanish immersion classes on the junior high school level, which concentrate equally on English and Spanish language skills, can receive college credit by taking the advanced placement tests.
"They're really learning how to study," King said. "They're learning skills that will help them concentrate better on their other studies down the road - if they continue to practice them."