Comments about ‘Elevating the conversation: Dual-immersion students, classes grow up’

These programs are twenty five years behind where they should have been thanks to the opposition of some school district administrators who thought that they were too much work to administer. Thanks to the good administrators who put the children's education first and fought for these programs.

Language ability is so important when we are so social in our families and friendships.

We should be happy to have these programs in schools and to show the positive results of increasing our ability to grow in proper language usage. I was fortunate to have taken 3 years of Spanish in Junior High School and 2 years of Latin in High School. Those languages have increased my understanding of words, uses, and communicating with people in all languages and cultures. I have been fortunate to have lived in places such as Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Germany, the Philippines and travelling in many other places such as Peru, Vietnam, Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan, Oman, the South Pacific, Australia, Thailand, Singapore, Colombia, and Panama. I spent 10 years working with professionals from India, Russian, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Canada, Korea, Uganda, Algeria, Argentina, Lithuania, Bangladesh, Belarus, Netherlands, Nepal, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Romania, Poland, Pakistan, Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Germany, Slovenia, Tunisia, Spain, Japan, Zimbabwe, and Turkey.

What a blessing to know those people. They learned English and loved meeting people in Utah and feeling the spirit, music and words of Temple Square.

Students in Utah needs to be comfortable and capable of speaking ENGLISH, first and foremost. Learning English must be the first priority always. A limited dual immersion program, can help transition a non-English speaking student until he or she is comfortable with the English language while still in Elementary school. Attempting to teach all the science, language arts, math, etc in in Secondary Schools environment, in different foreign languages, is impossible. As an child immigrant I should know, I speak three languages fluently; English first is the way to communicate, adapt and become adept in America.

I hope that when my son reaches school age we will be living in an area where these kinds of programs are available. Learning a foreign language is nothing but a positive. I especially like that these students learn about technical subject in a foreign language; it is in those specialized areas that learning a language can be most difficult.

I am surprised that they mentioned that a school decided against offering a Spanish-based science class because of the technical language involved. Most biological and chemical terminology translates very directly and very easily between Spanish and English because both languages draw such vocabulary from Latin.