By MATTHEW HAY BROWN
Courant Staff Writer
April 26 2004
NARANJITO, Puerto Rico -- Twenty-seven years in the classroom, and Jesus Rivera
still can build excitement around the difficult business of learning a second
language.
"This is English, la, la, la," he sings as the fifth-graders clap along, clearly
delighted. " ... Can you tell me, Karellis, what day is today?"
"Today is Wednesday," Karellis Garcia announces.
And the class is off, sprinting through drills and games and songs, all in
English.
But as the students file out of his classroom at the Adolfo Garcia community
school, Rivera acknowledges his efforts will almost certainly fall short.
"Fifty minutes of English in a classroom is not enough for a student to learn a
second language," he says. "When they go home, parents don't talk English, so
they are not able to continue practicing. We need more time of teaching English
as a second language in the public schools."
Politicians have long spoken of this Spanish-speaking U.S. territory as a
possible bridge between Latin America and the United States. As U.S. citizens,
Puerto Ricans may travel freely to study, work and live on the mainland.
But a century of public-school instruction in the dominant language of the
United States has not produced a bilingual population in this former colony of
Spain.
Education officials and outside observers say the reasons include: insufficient
time spent learning English; a shortage of instructors in English as a second
language; and a political environment in which attempts at reform get tangled in
the divisive debate over the island's relationship with the United States.
Until those conditions change, analysts say, limited English will continue to
mean limited opportunities, for individuals and for the island as a whole. And
students who migrate to the mainland will struggle in schools where the only
language of instruction is English.
On the most recent Puerto Rican Academic Progress Tests, taken last spring by
170,000 public-school students, only 50 percent demonstrated proficiency in
grade-specific standards in English. By most estimates, no more than a quarter
of the 3.8 million people who live on this Caribbean island are fluent in the
language - and many of those learned it in private schools or in the United
States.
"English is absolutely imperative; there's no question," says Miguel Soto Class,
executive director of the Center for the New Economy, an independent think tank
in San Juan. "It has nothing to do with politics or status or any of those
things. We are in the same hemisphere as the strongest, most powerful country in
the world, and they happen to speak English. Until Mexico becomes the strongest
economy in the world, English is going to be it for everybody."
Teacher Quality
From her eighth-floor office in the Department of Education tower in San Juan,
Pura Cotto Lopez surveys the island's student body and is hopeful. The veteran
university professor and president of Puerto Rico Teachers of English as a
Second Language took over in January as director of English instruction in the
Department of Education.
"I think our students are actually speaking more English," she says. "Even
though they tell you, `I don't speak English,' ... if you start talking to them,
you'll see that, yes, they can communicate in the language. ... If we do get
these qualified teachers, definitely, I have no doubt we can actually become a
bilingual island."
About 600,000 students attend more than 1,500 public elementary, middle and high
schools operated by the department. By law, each takes English for at least 50
minutes per day.
"Learning a second language, we can have that silent stage through the process,
and that stage can last for many, many, many years, until actually when you can
say, `You know what, I have the confidence, and I have the need to actually
communicate,'" Cotto says. "I feel that that happens to many of our students on
the island. That, yeah, they're in that silent stage - until they find that need
to actually speak. But they're absorbing everything."
The goal, Cotto says, is that students speak the language by the end of sixth
grade, and become fully bilingual by the time they finish high school. The
principal challenge, she says, is finding enough qualified instructors to teach
them.
The department employs about 12,000 English teachers; 1,000 of them are working
on provisional licenses. Most are native Spanish speakers; not all are fluent in
English.
University of Puerto Rico Professor Roame Torres Gonzalez, author of "Language,
Bilingualism and Nationality," says the quality of instruction in the public
schools varies widely.
"Many teachers that are supposed to teach English in Puerto Rico, especially at
the elementary schools, are not really prepared to teach English," says Torres,
chairman of the Department of Education Fundamentals at UPR. "Really, one can
say not only that they are not prepared, but that they don't speak English very
well."
Cotto says the Department of Education is in the process of training and
certifying more instructors.
"We need to understand that to teach a second language, you don't have to be a
native speaker," Cotto says.
`Better Than A Doctorate'
Raymond Cintron, a native of the Bronx, moved with his family to Naranjito as a
child. Now he teaches English at the Escuela de la Comunidad Adolfo Garcia,
using movies and pop songs to engage his middle-school-age students.
"I want them to go a little bit further than being able to answer true or
false," Cintron says. "I want them to go to analysis. But I'll be honest:
Sometimes we don't get to that. I go over things that the students were supposed
to learn in fifth or sixth grade, and we have to go back."
After class, a visitor tries to ask three of Cintron's eighth-graders in English
about their studies, their lives and their plans for the future. Beyond
providing their names and ages, they seem not to understand the questions.
By the end of high school, Cintron says, some of the students do learn to speak
English.
"It's possible, because I've seen it," he says. "Students who have never gone to
the States come out fluent. But out of 20, that's maybe two or three.
"The problem we have here is that since there isn't a necessity to use English,
it's not sink or swim; it's not immersion; kids don't have to learn it. At this
age, especially, they don't understand the importance," Cintron says.
Island businessman Jose Alsina, who has worked as a manager with International
Data Products, Warner-Lambert, Atari and General Signal, calls learning English
"the best thing that happened in my life."
"It's better than a doctorate," says Alsina, a public-school graduate who says
he picked up the language in the Boy Scouts and the National Guard. "At this
time in history, English and Spanish, related to high tech, business,
international communications, if you know both languages, you are able to
communicate very easily with half or more of the world."
Conversely, says Soto, of the Center for the New Economy, those who do not
master English risk isolation.
"Even the few kids that manage to do really well in public schools and have a
good education, you want to hire them, but you can't, or if you do, they're
limited, because they're not bilingual," he says. "Puerto Rico's economy has
been so linked to these multinationals, how can you work in any kind of senior
management position in Pfizer or Amgen or Hewlett-Packard and not be bilingual?"
`Thinking Of The Future'
In his classroom at the Escuela Bilingue Certenejas II in the town of Cidra,
second-grade teacher Jose Cruz puts on a cassette of the Beatles singing
"Please, Mr. Postman" and herds several students toward the front of the room.
The class is studying the solar system; Cruz, wearing a cape covered in stars,
planets and moons, is leading them in a play.
Certenejas II is one of the few English-only public schools in Puerto Rico. Its
185 students come from towns throughout the region to study a full curriculum
that includes math, science, social studies, art and music.
The school has overflowed out of the former community center in which it opened
five years ago and into portable classrooms. Principal Carmen Hernandez shows a
waiting list with dozens of names, and says she gets inquiries every day.
Seventh-grader Nilsa Rodriguez says she asked her parents to enroll her in the
school so she could learn English.
"I saw that they had problems getting work," she says. "I was thinking of the
future."
Certenejas II is a remnant of pro-statehood Gov. Pedro Rossello's Bilingual
Citizen project. The initiative to expand English instruction met resistance
from Rossello's pro-commonwealth and independentista critics.
"It caused a furor," says Jorge Velez, who teaches English to business students
at the University of Puerto Rico in Bayamon. "It was seen as Rossello and his
people trying to bring more English in and pave the way for statehood. And it
was probably a little bit of that, too."
Officials across the ideological spectrum say they support the development of
English as a second language, but attempts by successive governments to improve
public-school instruction have met political and practical obstacles on an
island that places great value on its Spanish roots.
English has been a sensitive subject in Puerto Rico since the U.S. Navy invaded
in 1898. The first American governors set up English-only public education as a
means of Americanizing the population. But they never found enough teachers
capable of teaching in English, the policy helped to enflame nationalism, and
dropout rates increased.
"Probably English in Puerto Rico is not English as language," says Pablo Rivera
Ortiz, undersecretary of education for academic affairs in the pro-commonwealth
government of current Gov. Sila Calderon. "It's English as politics."
Copyright 2004, Hartford Courant