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Influx of English learners a challenge for California

Tyche Hendricks, Jill Tucker, Chronicle Staff Writers

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Almost 30 percent of the non-English speakers in the United States live in California, many of them in households that are "linguistically isolated" because they lack adults or teenagers proficient in English, according to data from the 2000 census released Tuesday.

The disproportionately high number of Californians with limited English skills is straining the state's education system, according to school officials interviewed about the report, as immigrants continue moving here, primarily from Mexico and Central America and also from Asia.

But immigrants are eager to learn, and their children are mastering English and successfully assimilating into American society, demographers and education experts said.

"California is the leading destination for immigrants to the United States, and the vast majority of immigrants don't come to the U.S. speaking English well," said Hans Johnson, a demographer at the San Francisco-based Public Policy Institute of California. "If you go to Chinatown, you'll hear Chinese widely spoken today, just as you did 40 years ago. But that doesn't mean that the children of immigrants aren't learning English. They are. And by the third generation, they're monolingual in English. That still remains as true as it did for the big waves of European immigrants" a century ago.

The task of helping immigrants and their children learn English falls especially hard on California, which is home to 29 percent of the country's limited-English speakers although it contains just 12 percent of the total U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau's analysis of data from 2000.

California schools face a serious shortage of teachers trained to instruct English learners, said Veronica Aguila, interim director for professional development with the state Department of Education.

"It is an added challenge, most definitely, especially considering that 1 in 4 students in California is an English learner," she said.

But those who do master the new language outperform native English speakers academically, she added. And the state's schools are doing a better job these days of helping students learn English, said Peter Schrag, who has written several books about education and immigration in California.

"The percent of kids who have been rated proficient (in English) has gone up considerably in the last few years," he said. "We're making progress."

Schrag credits the federal No Child Left Behind program with forcing states to pay attention to the academic skills of students who face linguistic as well as economic challenges, rather than just improving scores on average.

While the state's public schools are teaching children English, it can be harder for adults to find the classes they need, said Patricia Gandara, a professor of education at UC Davis. A survey of community colleges in the 1980s found a deficit of hundreds of thousands of seats in classes for English learners, she said, and the situation is not much better today.

"It's not a uniquely California problem, but California ought to be on top of this," Gandara said. "If there's one thing immigrants want, they want to learn English. ... But the resources are not available."

Still, countless adult immigrants seek out English teachers and find them around the Bay Area and across the state.

Every day, 600 to 800 English learners file into the Berkeley Adult School to learn the language. Some are just beginning with the basic, "My name is ... ." Others are nearly fluent. They came to the United States for reasons as varied as the students themselves.

Peruvian Ivan Guevara, 27, arrived alone three years ago in search of the much-touted American dream.

"I knew that America gave opportunity to those who want to improve their lives," he said.

Guevara's dream is to go to law school, and the first step was learning English. He studies at the adult school for 3 1/2 hours every day with a handful of equally advanced students from China, Japan, Peru and Iran.

Samaneh Nili, 28, is nearly fluent. She learned much of the language in her native Iran. But she knows learning English and getting a green card are critical if she is to resume the professional life of an architect, which she left behind six months ago when she came to the United States with her husband, also an Iranian.

In 2000, 47 million Americans spoke a language other than English at home, and 12 million of them lived in California, according to the analysis released Tuesday. By 2005, an estimated 52 million people in the country spoke a language other than English at home, according to a census survey. More than half of those foreign-language speakers are proficient in English, the surveys found.

The foreign language skills that immigrants bring to the United States can become a great resource for American society, said Gandara.

"They could be teachers, social workers, police officers. ... We could benefit greatly by having these people in board rooms, in the State Department, or doing international trade and negotiation," she said. "We ought to be exploiting the advantages these people have, rather than seeing them as some kind of a burden on society."

But without English skills, immigrants can be at a serious disadvantage in the workforce and other areas of society, researchers say.

A forthcoming Harvard University study of Latin American immigrants found that those who mastered English were much more fully involved in their communities and had larger networks of friends than those who did not speak English, said Thomas Sander, director of the Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement in America at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

"The research doesn't suggest we should become an English-only country, but it does suggest that for immigrants, learning English is a really important skill to integrate into your own community and the broader community," Sander said. "This ought to be high on our national agenda, to get the resources so more immigrants can participate both civically and socially."

While California still receives the lion's share of new immigrants, they are increasingly dispersing to other states, particularly in the South and Midwest, said Brookings Institution demographer Bill Frey.

"California is better positioned to accommodate new immigrants and their children because the state has years of experience doing that and has a critical mass of people speaking Spanish," said Frey. "That's not the case in Georgia or North Carolina."

Schrag said California can show the way for other parts of the country, which are just beginning to get a taste of the diversity of immigrants' languages and cultures.

"There's still a lot of xenophobia," Schrag said, "but on the ground, we've done reasonably well. The younger generation seems quite habituated to the idea that wherever you go, you hear Spanish spoken. The basic message is, 'It ain't so bad. You'll get used to it.' "