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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)
Current rank: Not ranked
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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