ALLENTOWN: District looks to revamp world language program

Italian classes to be offered

By Peter Sclafani, Staff Writer
   ALLENTOWN — Students in the Upper Freehold Regional School District will have the chance to immerse themselves in new languages and cultures in the upcoming school year.
   Stephen Cochrane, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, gave the Board of Education a presentation June 20 about the district’s revamped world language program, which will include Italian.
   The program calls for students to spend more time practicing speaking the language with other students in the classroom and less time listening to the teacher and regurgitating information onto worksheets and tests.
   Mr. Cochrane said the goal of the new program aims to go beyond making the students proficient with the grammar and spelling of a foreign language. The students also will learn to speak it well and carry on conversations.
   A world language committee, comprised of 10 teachers and administrators, was put together by the district to review the current world language program and then recommend revisions and enhancements to the program.
   Currently, Spanish is only taught for 30 minutes once a week to students in elementary grades, according to the world language committee’s report. However, this small amount of time spent teaching Spanish is not enough to establish a proficiency at an early age, Mr. Cochrane said.
   The world language committee conducted a survey to get a sense of what the people in the town wanted. Mandarin Chinese and Arabic both were included in the survey, but it was determined teaching Italian would be the best use of school resources, according to Mr. Cochrane.
   In addition to the surveys conducted, parents had the chance to voice their opinions and make suggestions in parent focus groups.
   The goal of the new program, according to Mr. Cochrane, is to raise the oral proficiency levels of all the students participating in a foreign language. He said he would like graduating seniors to be able to connect sentences and paragraphs together to hold a complicated conversation on a wide variety of topics.
   The committee looked at the language program in the West Windsor-Plainsboro School District, a model recommended by the state, for ideas on how to improve the UFRSD’s current language program.
   Immersion into the language and culture with a focus on students helping to teach the class was found to be the best way to engage students.
   There needs to be a focus on students putting together presentations and speaking the language rather than just writing it down, Mr. Cochrane said.
   Using video conferencing and email communication will allow sister schools in both Latin America and Italy to teach the students about the language and culture of other countries.
   Fourth-graders will spend 17 minutes more a week learning Spanish. At the high school, students taking AP language will have class every other day the entire school year instead of once daily for only half the school year.
   The world language committee hopes that by extending classes for the entire year, students will retain more knowledge and gain a higher level of proficiency.
   Mr. Cochrane said he knows firsthand how difficult it is to learn a new language.
   ”I struggled to learn Latin during high school,” he said, “and I limped through Russian in college.”
   Despite, the tough time he had learning a new language, he stressed the importance of being able to speak more than just English.
   ”Understanding another language is a critical component of economic success,” Mr. Cochrane said. “It’s essential for students to learn a new culture and look at the world from a different perspective.”