Schools give Spanish-speaking adults primer in own language first

These adult schools make sure Hispanic students are literate in Spanish before teaching English to them. They find that they learn English much easier this way. - - Donna Poisl

By Timothy Pratt

Hector Godoy stands in the rear of a trailer converted into a classroom, drawing lines on a board between the letter “p” and each of the five vowels.

He asks one of his 13 students, Maricela Bolaños, to sound out a series of words using those letters. Bolaños is learning to read and write, in Spanish, at 53 years old.

Her class is a “plaza comunitaria,” a program within the division of the Clark County School District that is aimed at teaching English to adults. The plaza’s unlikely home in that division stems from a discovery academics made earlier this decade: If Hispanic immigrants are to learn to read and write English, they must first be literate in their native language.
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