A Bilingual Oral Language and Conceptual Development Program for Spanish-Speaking Pre-School Children

Abstract

Of the approximately 90,000 migrants identified in Michigan in 1968, about 10% were intrastate and another 10% left the migrant stream at the end of the growing season to make Michigan their home. The great majority, however, came to Michigan from other states in May or June, moved within Michigan every two to four weeks, and then returned to their home states in September or October. Most of Michigan's migrants are from Texas and New Mexico, and most have a Spanish-speaking background. There are some migrants from Florida, California, and other states, including some blacks and Appalachia whites. The Michigan Department of Education runs a comprehensive program serving the social, physical, occupational, and educational needs of this population. The materials I will describe are a part of the educational program at the preschool level, which in Michigan means primarily fouryear-olds. Although the older children generally speak a non-standard dialect of English learned from their peers and in school, the preschoolers most often speak a non-standard dialect of Spanish, learned from their parents. There are obviously many serious problems in implementing a meaningful educational program for a highly mobile, non-English-speaking population. The two problems of most relevance at this time are: (1) the teachers involved in the program, who usually have experience with disadvantaged youngsters, have little background in either linguistics or in teaching English as a foreign language, and (2), because of this lack of appropriate preparation, the teacher is more likely to assume that low I.Q. or motivation accounts for student failure rather than assuming that she can and should modify her language-teaching techniques until she becomes effective. For these reasons, the program I will describe gives the teacher detailed and carefully planned oral language lessons that take into account important linguistic considerations. This provides her with linguistically controlled activities, while at the same time preparing her to develop similar activities of her own. The package we developed should be thought of as an ordered sequence of suggestions to teachers. We have sought to provide