07/28/08 — VERNON TOWNSHIP — With the growing support of the community and the financial backing it needs by school board members, the World Languages committee in Crawford Central School District hopes to revolutionize the district’s curriculum by beginning to teach foreign languages in kindergarten.

The committee’s goal, according to Assistant Superintendent Charles Heller, is to adopt a program that will broaden young students’ exposure to foreign languages and cultures and cultivate interest, not develop fluency.

“It’s not as though we feel like we are falling behind, but instead we think that by familiarizing them with these new concepts early on, they will have more opportunities in the future because they will have a more globalized education,” he said.

Heller and Suzanne Good, director of elementary curriculum at Crawford Central, traveled to Hempfield School District in West Mullen County near Pittsburgh recently to see a similar elementary school program in action. They were thrilled with what they saw.

“We saw kids who were very interested, very enthusiastic and very eager to participate,” Heller said. “We came away from Hempfield with a very positive feeling that a World Languages program at Crawford Central would really help us take our students to the next level.”

As the nations of the world move toward a global economy, few people would now dispute the benefits of learning a foreign language. With those benefits in mind, the World Languages committee formed in October to develop a program that would help strengthen the learning curve of students as they learn by exposing them to the sounds and teaching them basic vocabulary in languages such as Spanish, French and German at a much younger age.

The committee hopes to put the finishing touches on a proposal it can present to the school board for an approval to begin implementing a program as early as the 2009-10 academic year. There are federal grants that would help with the start-up costs which are expected to exceed $100,000 a year for textbooks and trained faculty. The committee also hopes to drum up support from the business community because it would benefit from a more educated, well-rounded pool of local workers.

Points that the group has decided on thus far include adopting a five-day class rotation schedule that would provide students with 36 40-minute lessons each year, and the adoption of an extended school day.

“Beginning instruction at 8:20 a.m. instead of 8:30 a.m. is doable and wouldn’t be taking away from anything that we are doing right now,” Heller said. “But in order to do that, we may have to add another bus route to ensure students’ earlier arrival.”

Committee consensus was that 30 minutes of instruction wouldn’t be sufficient because of the transition time students need to mentally “switch gears” from one subject to another. But because the students’ regular classroom teachers would be assisted by a World Languages teacher, that transition period should be kept to an absolute minimum.

While the committee said it would consider adding additional languages such as Mandarin Chinese in the future, its focus will begin with Spanish, French and German.

The World Language committee will meet again Aug. 15 at 8 a.m. in the Instructional Support Center at Mercer Pike. The public is encouraged to attend and invited to RSVP by calling 724-3960.



Penni Schaefer can be reached at 724-6370 or by e-mail at pschaefer@meadvilletribune.com.





SIDEBAR



Learning a second language at an early age:

n Has a positive effect on intellectual growth.

n Enriches and enhances a child’s mental development.

n Leaves students with more flexibility in thinking, greater sensitivity to language and a better ear for listening.

n Improves a child’s understanding of his/her native language.

n Gives a child the ability to communicate with people they would otherwise not have the chance to know.

n Opens the door to other cultures and helps a child understand and appreciate people from other countries.

n Gives a student a head start in language requirements for college.

n Increases job opportunities in many careers where knowing another language is a real asset.

Source: The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Web site, www.discoverlanguages.org





Careers in which foreign languages be advantageous



Banking and insurance

Media (television, radio, newspapers)

Tourism (hotels, airlines)

Government (local, state and federal agencies)

Non-profit organizations

International Embassies

Import/export businesses

Health and social services

Immigration services

Teaching (elementary, secondary and post-secondary)