Schools face foreign language: English

By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer

Ask a teacher at Ala Wai Elementary how many languages are spoken on campus and she'll smile indulgently.

Pinky Kobayashi, an ESL teacher at Ala Wai Elementary, works through a writing lesson with her students. Schools around the state are struggling with the rising number of students with limited English skills. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

"We've got it all in one package," said Pinky Kobayashi, an English as a Second Language teacher at Ala Wai Elementary for 12 years. "We have everyone from the city kids from Japan to the students who have never seen a car before."

With 173 ESL students on a campus of about 500, teachers say the international diversity shows that Waikiki's high-rise condominiums and walk-up apartments are often the first stop for immigrant families in Hawai'i.

But it also shows the increasing difficulty of educating Hawai'i students, and the enormous challenge facing schools like Ala Wai that are on the front line of teaching English to immigrant children.

At Ala Wai Elementary and other schools across the state, there is a rising number of students with limited English skills and other educational disadvantages.

Now, 50.6 percent of 183,000 public school children in the state require services for ESL, high poverty, special-education, or some combination of those, according to the Department of Education's most recent Superintendent's Report, an annual account of public school statistics and data that covers the 2000-01 school year.

In the past decade, the number of students who have limited English skills has increased 44 percent, from 8,861 to 12,837, while the total school population has remained stable.

Given that those disadvantaged children require services that cost an average of about twice as much as standard, the task facing the Department of Education is steadily growing more expensive and more difficult, education officials say.

At Ala Wai Elementary, about one-third of the school is enrolled in ESL. About one-half of the children have been through the program at one time and speak a language other than English at home. In kindergarten, it's not uncommon for only two or three students in a class to be native English speakers, Kobayashi said.

And last year, more than 55 percent of the children at Ala Wai qualified for the free or reduced-price lunch program, a common measure of high poverty.

"We see it as a blessing that we have so much diversity," Principal Charlotte Unni said.

Unni holds up a stack of school letters to parents. On the top is the English version; below are the translations into native languages.

Aileen Sato, an ESL instructor at Ala Wai Elementary, helps one of her students with a math lesson. About one-third of the students at Ala Wai Elementary are enrolled in ESL. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

Of the state's nearly 13,000 ESL students, 5,000 live in the Honolulu district, said Pat Ishitani, a district ESL resource teacher.

Ishitani said it is rare to find a school that has fewer than four languages spoken by children.

Kathryn Davis, the director of the Center for Second Language Research at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, said that with a growing ESL population, there's a need for improved education services for immigrants.

Nationally, researchers are looking at bilingual programs, which slowly introduce English skills to children, instead of the English immersion that has been common in American schools. Davis said those bilingual programs allow children to develop reading, writing and oral skills in English and their native language.

"If you have a K-12 program they're absolutely fluent in two languages," Davis said. "There's a national push now for that. People are beginning to realize that we're wasting our natural resources in terms of the languages the immigrant children bring with them."

A new program at Farrington High School, which has 500 ESL students, most of whom speak Ilocano or Samoan, is introducing those native languages as academic subjects.

The Hawaiian language immersion program is another example of trying to use an indigenous language as the primary language of education, Davis said.

And UH is developing a bilingual studies program, which will create a group of teachers qualified to run bilingual studies programs.

But Ishitani said that with the number of languages spoken by children on many campuses, bilingual programs could be difficult to implement.

"Where we can find the bilingual support, we use it," Ishitani said. "But when you have 20-something languages, it's almost impossible to have bilingual speakers for everyone."

Robert Gibson, an associate professor of second language studies at the UH-Manoa who was one of the first group of ESL teachers hired in Hawai'i in 1970, said that even though nearly all Hawai'i teachers will encounter immigrant children in their classes, few other than the ESL teachers are trained to work with them.

Children spend a maximum of about two hours a day in an ESL classroom; the rest of the day they are mainstreamed with other children.

"These kids are spread throughout the state," Gibson said. "Virtually every teacher is going to have these kids at one time or another. In California, it could be that some teacher has all Spanish-speaking kids and another teacher might never have any Spanish-speaking kids. That doesn't happen here."

He estimates it would take 13 years to train all of the DOE's teachers in ESL skills. The courses are available online, but only 15 people are signed up. And while UH education majors can take ESL classes as a way to move up the union pay scale once they become teachers, there's no requirement to do so.

"It just seems like a very daunting task," Gibson said.

Schools are also under pressure from the No Child Left Behind Act, a federal law that gives high-poverty schools financial help, but threatens a series of sanctions if schools fail to improve standardized test scores every year.

Ala Wai's test scores have been rising the last few years, Unni said.

On the last Stanford Achievement Test, children scored above the national average on reading and math. Of the third graders, 83 percent scored average or above average on reading, and 84 percent scored average or above average on math. The national average is 77 percent.

Teachers attribute the test scores to an intensive school-wide reading and literacy program. The school has also formed partnerships with UH and community groups to bring a variety of tutoring programs to campus. Through a partnership with UH, Ala Wai also has Project Awesome, a before- and after-school tutoring program paid for by a federal grant.

"We tell the kids how lucky and special they are to be able to speak two or three languages," Kobayashi said.

Reach Jennifer Hiller at jhiller@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8084.