RUNNING HEAD: LEARNING NEEDS ASSESSEMENT: FOREIGN LANGAUGE

Learning Needs Assessment: Foreign Language in Elementary Schools Ashley Dajero Averett University ED505: Curriculum Development W435 Janine Davis, Ph.D. June 29, 2012

Learning Needs Assessment 2 Introduction The United States is referred to as the worlds melting pot, since immigrants from all over the world come here seeking opportunities they would not have in their homelands. Along with their material belongings, they bring their culture, values, recipes, and their native language. According to the Census of 2007, out of the families that claimed they did not speak English in their home, 62.3% of those families spoke only Spanish or a version of Spanish (Shin & Rominski, 2010). With that in mind, it would greatly benefit any school system to start teaching foreign languages, mainly Spanish, at the elementary level. While Virginia Beach Public County Schools (VBPCS) has a curriculum that sets them ahead of the curve, this would be even more accurate if it offered foreign language classes starting in kindergarten. Following Virginias Standards of Learning, the Virginia Beach Learning Objectives, and planning with grade-level teachers could develop a curriculum developed for a foreign language class. Since not all instructional staff is bilingual, it would be best to have a specialist teacher, who could come into the class for thirty minutes, once a week, and teach the foreign language. The specialist teacher would collaborate with the classroom teacher to teach vocabulary, linguistic skills, or anything else that the teacher is currently working on in the class. If a student comes to VBPCS during the middle of a

Learning Needs Assessment 3 year, that student can take remediation classes based on the specialist and parents recommendations. In elementary school in North Carolina about twenty years ago, classes of all grades had to attend a Spanish class once a week. Students memorized words and their meanings, recited oral dialogue from a script, and practiced writing words in Spanish. As students advanced in each grade, the material became more challenging and the Spanish vocabulary and syntax was better explained. While this was not being researched to find if it enhanced the students grades, it did benefit some of the students in the long run. After looking in the Averett Library databases, searching Google Scholar, and searching the Internet for research that support foreign language in elementary school, several useful articles and websites were found. Since searching for foreign language in elementary schools mostly yielded articles about English as Second Language (ESL) students, it was imperative to narrow the search to the curriculum for foreign language.

Summary of the Learning Needs Assessment The proposed program above is intended to be from kindergarten to fifth grade, but for the purposes of this paper, second grade will be the main focus. The duration of the program would be the entire school year,

Learning Needs Assessment 4 except for the first and last week of school. This schedule is also typical for other specialists in elementary school buildings, so it should be easier for the classroom teachers to adapt. Moreover, the class will take place once a week, on a given day, and last for no more than thirty minutes. The objectives of the program will vary for each grade level. Since the students had a base knowledge of letters and common words from kindergarten and had experiences orally creating sentences in first grade, second grade will be at a reviewing stage. In this stage they will learn more vocabulary and how to strengthen their sentences, as well as delve more into the Hispanic culture and develop dialogues to present in the classroom. Moreover, second grade students will begin to practice writing Spanish words and the sentences that they create. There are hopeful outcomes for this program. First, it is expected that students will perform at a higher level on summative assessments and standardized testing. Second, students will be expected to increase their linguistic skills, such as grammar use, syntax use, and oral presentation. Lastly, students will develop a more positive attitude toward other cultures and the people of that culture.

Other Findings During the literature review, several articles and books support the

Learning Needs Assessment 5 outcomes of this program. The following research supports that students that are learning a foreign language earned higher scores on classroom assessments and standardized testing. Students that were bilingual skilled readers scored higher on word-reading and spelling tasks than the monolingual skilled readers, in a study of children age nine to ten (DAngiulli, Siegel, & Serra, 2001). In a study on third-graders in 1997, students in the Spanish classes scored significantly higher than the group that did not receive Spanish instruction in math and language on the Metropolitan Achievement Test (MAT) (Armstrong & Rogers)

The research also shows that students in the elementary schools that learn a foreign language will increase their linguistic skills. Demonts study emphasized an advantage for the children who attended bilingual classes since kindergarten: they were better at grammatical judgment and correction tasks and word recognition (2001).

Not only did the research support the above outcomes, but it was evident that learning a foreign language at the elementary level will help foster a better attitude toward different cultures and languages. In a 1964 study, focusing on 63 fifth graders, students that were learning Spanish, had significantly more positive attitudes toward the Spanish-speaking peoples

Learning Needs Assessment 6 they had studied about than did the group that had not studied Spanish (Riestra & Johnson)

After scouring the Virginia Beach Public County Schools website, there was no contact information as to who to contact to employ this program. This program would greatly benefit all of the students in Virginia Beach and enhance their understanding in all aspects of their classwork.

References Armstrong, P. W., & Rogers, J. D. (1997). Basic skills revisited: The effects of foreign language instruction on reading, math, and language arts. Learning Languages, 2(3), 20-31. D'Angiulli, A., Siegel, L. S., & Serra, E. (2001). The development of reading in English and Italian in bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 22(4), 479-507. from PsycINFO database. Demont, E. (2001). Contribution of early 2nd-language learning to the development of linguistic awareness and learning to read/Contribution de l'apprentissage prcoce d'une deuxime langue au dveloppment de la conscience lingustique et l'apprentissage de la lecture. International Journal of Psychology, 36(4), 274-

Learning Needs Assessment 7 285. from PsycINFO database Riestra, M. A., & Johnson, C. E. (1964). Changes in attitudes of elementary-school pupils toward foreign-speaking pupils resulting from the study of a foreign language.