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

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

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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