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30169: Hermantin(News)Haitian parents face choice: Teach children Creole or French? (fwd)




From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>


Local

Haitian parents face choice: Teach children Creole or French?

By JENNIFER KAY, The Associated Press
Feb 10, 2007 12:01 AM (27 days ago)
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MIAMI - The kindergartners hunched over their tiny desks, drawing and labeling their favorite characters from the fable "The Little Red Hen." Genevieve Henriquez, their teacher at Morningside Elementary School, caught a few students checking an English alphabet chart to spell "pig" in their wide-ruled notebooks.

"Kochon! K-o-ch-on," she said, redirecting their gaze to a Haitian Creole alphabet chart on the opposite wall to phonetically spell the word for pig. Her class just read "Ti Poul Wouj La," a translation of the fable, part of the 75 minutes they spend every day learning in Creole.

Morningside, where 80 percent of the 450 pupils are of Haitian descent, is at the center of a debate among Haitian-Americans about whether it would be best for their children to learn Creole, which is used almost solely in the impoverished Caribbean nation, or the more universal French or Spanish as a second language with English.

The school started immersion classes in Spanish and French for its kindergarten and first grade students when classes resumed last August. Community members with children not yet enrolled at the school pushed to add Creole, and an ensuing fight exposed lingering perceptions about poor, uneducated Haitians, Principal Kathleen John-Loussaint said.

In Haiti, everyone speaks Creole - a blend of French and the West African languages spoken by slaves in Haiti's colonial past. But French - spoken by only about 10 percent of the population - has long been considered in Haiti to be the mark of education. Both are the country's official languages.

"It was a little bit of a controversy. Creole is more of a language of - I don't want to say peasant, but of the working class in Haiti," John-Loussaint said.

Morningside sits in Miami's Little Haiti, a neighborhood marked by crime and poverty with some gentrification at its boundaries. Nearly all its children participate in the free- and reduced-price lunch program for low-income families.

Creole is often the first language encountered in Little Haiti. It's brightly painted in the names of botanicas and travel agencies and murals painted on the sides of other stores and spilling from radios behind shop counters.

"French may be wanted, but they (Morningside students) are not speaking French at home. They're not speaking English at home," John-Loussaint said.

Critics who protested the inclusion of Creole argued French is more useful beyond the neighborhood and that speaking French is equally important in preserving their culture.

"People associate class with it still. When you think of French, you think of education, sophistication, culture," said Jacquelyne Hoy, principal of the private Lycee Franco-Americain International School in Broward County, where about three-quarters of the students are of Haitian descent. The children there are taught in English and French, no Creole.

Sandra Nelson-Pollas, a Haitian woman who sends her two sons to Hoy's school, said she wanted to reinforce the French her family speaks at home; she speaks Creole with her siblings, but her children don't speak the language.

"It's not that I don't want them to speak Creole," said Nelson-Pollas of Pembroke Pines, "but when I was growing up Creole was just broken French. I wanted them to have a full comprehension in French, get the proper foundation."

Not all Haitian parents in the Morningside community thought Creole was the best choice for their children, officials said. French and Spanish are the most popular dual-language courses for the 65 kindergartners and 80 first graders. In all three programs, the students spend at least 75 minutes a day reading and writing in the second language; the dual-language courses will extend through all five grades in the coming years.

"Some parents felt, 'I can teach my son how to read and write Creole at home, I would rather him learn French,'" said Joanne Urrutia, director of the Miami-Dade school district's bilingual education and world languages program. "Other parents said, 'I want my child to learn Spanish, because in this community, to get a job, Spanish would be more helpful.'"

Educators say dual-language programs help children who don't speak English at home reinforce reading comprehension and vocabulary skills in both languages.

"For all kids, you are increasing the amount of time you're teaching literacy skills," Urrutia said.

On a recent Monday - or "Lendi," as the class repeats in Creole - Henriquez points at a "kalandriye" with a ruler as her students recite the days of the week. Reviewing the "alfabe," the children clamor to list all the words they know that begin with the 's' sound: soley (sun), sak (bag), sizo (scissors) and sitwon (lemon).

Most of the students in her class already learned some Creole at home, Henriquez said. "But the Creole they know is the talking. A lot of them lack the Creole vocabulary," she said. "They can speak it but they might not know the words. They don't know the letters or sounds in Creole."

Creole supporters say learning the language will help their children prepare for a bilingual job market. About 80 percent the nearly 700,000 Haitians living in the U.S. say they do not speak English at home, and about half of those say they speak English less than "very well," according to U.S. Census data. Miami Dade College last year started a new associate degree in translation to meet the need for Haitian-Creole interpreters in hospitals, government agencies and the court system.

Since the libraries at the Broward County schools her daughters attend don't stock many Creole-language books, Arnode Thelemaque of Coral Springs buys textbooks and collections of Haitian stories herself from a publisher specializing in Creole education materials. Her family studies Creole together to communicate with older relatives and give the girls, now 8 and 12, a future job skill.

"My mother does not speak English, my mother speaks Creole, so they need to understand her," said Thelemaque, a nurse. "I want them to be able to communicate with the Haitian population. I think it would be embarrassing if they go somewhere and they tell someone they're Haitian and they can't speak the language."

Advocates say learning Creole is more than a language skill for Haitian children who often hide their heritage because Haiti is associated with refugees.

"They turn around and tell you they're not Haitian because they don't want to be treated like that," said Gepsie Metellus, executive director of a Haitian community center near Morningside.

"If you give them nothing to fight that off with - many of these children are living in environments where the parents don't have the wherewithal to fight that - that child is set up to fail."

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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