Grade School Youngsters Quickly Pick Up Spanish

Clark County school officials say the 4-year-old curriculum they designed to teach Spanish to every elementary school pupil in the district is working - so well, in fact, that education publishers are marketing it nationwide.

“At this age, children are so receptive to learning,” Elena Steele, the district’s foreign-language specialist who designed the program, said. “You should see the children - they just get up and shout, ‘Buenos dias!”’

Steele designed videotaped Spanish language lessons for the district’s roughly 70,000 first-through fifth-graders. The lessons - 60 videos per grade level, with each video 15 minutes in length - are designed to be used by teachers who do not know Spanish.

Teachers are provided some training and receive step-by-step lesson plans with the videotapes.

The program, launched in first-grade classrooms in 1994, is now used in first through fourth grades. Fifth grade will be added district-wide beginning next year.

The district created the program primarily at the urging of school board member Lois Tarkanian.

“We’re going to have to compete globally - our children are going to be out there more than we have ever been,” Tarkanian said. “Children in other countries are taught three or four languages. What this has done is put our district above other districts in the country.”

Teaching foreign languages in elementary schools is fairly rare nationwide. Before Espanol Para Ti, foreign languages were offered, but not required, in Clark County middle and high schools.

Some studies and local educators argue that elementary school-age pupils are best suited developmentally to learn a foreign language, even as they are learning to read and write English.

School officials who have been monitoring the program say it works, teaching students basic Spanish vocabulary and phrases. They say assessments indicate that students are retaining about 79 percent of what is taught.