BRUNSWICK

Parlez-vous Français? Hablas Español?

Students in Brunswick schools may be speaking one of these languages as soon as kindergarten as the district eyes a dual language program. School officials say an immersive foreign language program would be beneficial for students who will grow up to compete in a global economy.

“Research has shown vocabulary and literacy achievement in English increases when students have the experience of another language,” said Superintendent Paul Perzanoski.

Coffin Elementary School teacher Alexandra Fish is the chairwoman of a group of teachers and administrators who have been researching and visiting other schools with dual language programs since August 2017.

She said research indicates such programs prime students brains and get them ready for the task of learning new languages.

“In addition, I think it gives students a broader cultural perspective too,” said Fish, “so I think that’s a great asset we could offer students.”

Being proficient in another language helps students be more flexible thinkers, she said.

Timothy G. Reagan, dean and professor of linguistics at the University of Maine’s College of Education and Human Development, said there are “all kinds of advantages to kids, cognitively, academically, socially and culturally, and so on.”

“One of the things we know about the competency in second languages,” he said, “is the earlier we start the better.”

That squares with what the school department is thinking — starting the program in kindergarten and adding a grade per year up to at least fifth grade. Content would be taught in English and a second language.

Students in the program would be able to study a subject in a foreign language. That is a very powerful approach to education, Reagan said.

“It does reflect what the very best of the educational research shows,” he said. “It’s good for kids and to be honest, which language they choose is not the most important question.”

Four years of a foreign language in a high school does not make students completely fluent.

Becoming bilingual

“There’s no reason that any human being can’t become bilingual and it’s very common in the United States to say, ‘Oh, well I was never very good at language.’ That tells us something about the way they were taught because most people in the world today speak two languages,” he said.

The district has not yet picked a language for the program. Perzanoski and Fish met with a representative from the French Consulate in Boston and will meet with a Spanish Consulate representative on June 14.

Perzanoski said there are a few dual Spanish programs in the region, but no French dual programs in any New England state except for a few in Massachusetts.

There is a private French school in Freeport.

Edit Dibra, a K-12 education officer with the French Consulate’s Office of Cultural Affairs, said the French government aims to support American schools interesting in having French programs. The top priority had been to promote French as a foreign language, she said, “but at the end of the day we understood that people were not speaking fluently this foreign language.”

The aim is now quality over quantity.

“It’s different with a dual French program, because at the end of this program you speak really fluently,” Dibra said.

Brunswick currently offers voluntary tutorial programs in many languages from kindergarten to fifth grade, French and Spanish classes for grades 6-12 and Latin for grades 9-12. Students take a course several periods a week, whereas in a dual language program, they’d be immersed in another language all day.

Still in the information gathering process, the committee hasn’t brought forth any proposals yet; that’s unlikely to happen before December, Perzanoski said. The group, however, is eyeing a September 2020 implementation date for a program.

While Fish said the committee is leaning toward full immersion in a second language, there are many models that exist. Some schools start with nearly full immersion classes in lower grades to create a strong foundation — which gradually decrease until they are using English in class half of the time by fifth grade.

Because dual language teachers are proficient in both languages, a dual language program wouldn’t require hiring extra teachers.

dmoore@timesrecord.com

Right now

• BRUNSWICK currently offers voluntary tutorial programs in many languages from kindergarten to fifth grade, French and Spanish classes for grades 6-12 and Latin for grades 9-12. Students take a course several periods a week.