More English-learners filling Hampton Roads classrooms

Catalina Berumen has 20 students in her fifth-grade class at Crestwood Intermediate School in Chesapeake.

Seven of them are still learning English.

They hail from India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Mexico and Puerto Rico, and they speak Tamil, Urdu, Tagalog and Spanish. She has books about India and Pakistan on her classroom shelves, and she has a book about Ramadan sitting on her chalkboard. Occasionally, she slips a Spanish word into her lessons.

At Crestwood, "it used to be a big deal" to have just one English-language learner, Principal Michael Ward said.

When he first started as principal 10 years ago, the school had one teacher designated to work with limited English proficiency - or LEP - students, he said. Today, Crestwood - which, with more than 30 LEP students, has the largest number among Chesapeake's schools - has three such teachers.

"And we're looking at adding a fourth," Ward said.

Schools throughout Hampton Roads are adapting to a slow but steady increase in students whose native language isn't English. While the trend isn't as pronounced as it is in Northern Virginia, where in some schools LEP students can make up more than 15 percent of the population, over the past decade, the smaller rise in Hampton Roads has still made an impact.

In 1993, Chesapeake had 50 LEP students division wide, according to the Virginia Department of Education. This year, the school division has more than 600, said Anita James, director of elementary curriculum and instruction.

Spanish speakers make up a little less than half of Chesapeake's overall LEP population. The rest speak a medley of languages: Tagalog, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Korean. Crestwood also has students who speak Japanese, Gujarati - an Indian language - and Amharic, the language spoken in Ethiopia.

Up until this most recent wave, most of the LEP students who came to Chesapeake schools were recent immigrants themselves. They came speaking no English, or very little, James said.

Today, she said, it's more typical to see students who are second-generation immigrants - born in the United States, but growing up in houses where English isn't the primary language.

As a result, it's no longer always obvious who the English language learners are in the classroom, because most have learned enough to go shopping, run errands and talk with friends. But teachers aren't confident they know enough to function in an academic setting.

In Chesapeake, school officials partnered with Regent University last year to send teachers to classes where they learn how to work with English language learners.

Along with courses in techniques and strategies, teachers take a linguistics class, where they study how language works and why a student who speaks, say, Japanese might order his sentences with the subject first and the verb last, after the object. They study the difference between acquiring a first language and a second and how to address cultural differences that, if ignored, could become a barrier to learning.

For example, while in the United States students are expected to make eye contact with the teacher, "in some cultures, a means of showing respect for authority is looking down," said Deanna Nisbet, who directs the Regent program.

"How do you think that's going to play out in a U.S. classroom?" she said. "Not very well."

Chesapeake began the partnership last January. Newport News schools have partnered with Regent since 2007, and Virginia Beach since 2002.

As the number of English-language learners in her classroom has increased, Berumen said she's found herself adjusting her own teaching style. She sometimes gives instruction to the class as a whole then gives a separate set of instructions in simpler language to her LEP students. She seeks out pieces of culture, such as her books on other countries, so that "students can see themselves in what they're doing."

On a recent day, she was counting down from 10 to get students to quiet down. When she reached five, she switched into Spanish.

"Cuatro... tres... dos... uno... cero. Cero tiempo," she said.

"What does that mean?" one student whispered.

"Zero time," a friend whispered back.

Alicia Wittmeyer, (757) 222-5216, alicia.wittmeyer@pilotonline.com Chesapeake Norfolk virginia beach suffolk portsmouth