Immigrants learn the English they know often isn't enough

DATE                  02/23/92
NEWSPAPER             THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
SECTION               NEWS
EDITION               MORNING
PAGE                  a26
STORY LENGTH          20 INCHES
HEADLINE               Immigrants learn the English they know often isn't 
                         enough
BYLINE/CREDIT          Dan Froomkin:The Orange County Register
SUBJECT TERMS          OC:SCHOOLS:LANGUAGE:IMMIGRATION:STUDENTS
 
     Immigrant students who have made their way through Orange
  County's public schools often tell of months and sometimes years
  spent in the dark as they struggled to make sense of the babble of
  English emerging from their teachers.
     And they describe a system that seemed satisfied when they
  learned enough English to get by and didn't push them, or even help
  them, achieve fluency.
     "I can understand most everything," said Rene Arias, a
  20-year-old Rancho Santiago College student who attended public
  schools in Fullerton starting in third grade. "But when I write, I
  don't have much vocabulary."
     "It seems like after you just understand, that's enough," said
  Adriana Lozano, 18, who was born in Mexico but spent 12 years in
  Santa Ana schools -- nine of them in English as a Second Langauge
  programs. "They don't move you ahead," she said.
     "Teachers pay more attention to you when you're small," she
  said. By high school, she said, she had a few teachers who really
  tried to motivate her -- and many more who didn't seem to care.
     Many students tell of confusion when they first started school.
  "I didn't understand anything," said Jose Guzman, 19, of his
  second-grade class in Garden Grove.
     Le Ha, 20, arrived in Garden Grove from Vietnam in 1985 and
  entered the eighth grade. "For the first few months, I felt bored
  and sad," he said.
     Over the years, he learned more. But at Rancho Santiago, he is
  taking an English as a Second Language class because his grammar
  and sentence construction are badly contorted.
     "The system works very well, if you study," Le said, blaming
  himself for the state of his English skills.
     But, asked to describe the schooling he received, he said his
  teachers probably could have done a better job, too.
     "I knew some teachers, they didn't teach anything. They just
  give you a picture, they give you the definition, and they tell you
  to just go home and study. They didn't teach us how to put them
  together," Le said.
     Even Orange County's best and brightest immigrant students --
  those who go on to selective colleges -- are frequently graduating
  from high school without a solid grasp of English.
     Robin Scarcella, an English professor who runs the English as a
  Second Language program at the University of California, Irvine,
  said that about 20 percent of non-native English speakers entering
  the university need language help.
     "They don't develop speaking skills, they don't develop the
  grammar, they don't develop the sophisticated vocabulary that they
  need in a university," Scarcella said.
     The average student in the English as a Second Language program
  at UCI has eight years in American schools.
     "We have had people who had come in at kindergarten and have
  just kind of been passed over by the system," Scarcella said.
     Freshman Paul Li found himself in UCI's English as a Second
  Language program even after several years of getting A's and B's in
  regular English classes at Estancia High School in Costa Mesa.
     "I was surprised I was placed in ESL," Li said.
     But he acknowledged that in high school he got into the habit of
  handing in papers that were not always grammatically correct. "They
  graded on content rather than grammar," Li said of his high school
  teachers. "When you write something wrong, they don't point it out,
  unless it's a major mistake."