Críticas Magazine

Bruce Jensen

Trick question
February 20, 2008

Who benefits from multilingual library services and materials? Don’t answer too quickly. The answers aren’t so obvious. Puzzling evidence for you today from Tennessee, Alabama, and Ohio.

I spoke with Sherry Scoville, the Youth Services Coordinator at Smyrna Public Library in Tennessee, about their popular Spanish-language classes for kids. "They’ve been very well received," Sherry told me. The classes for ages 8 to 14 started last fall and are now in the third session; the little kids’ classes (ages 4 to 7) just began. All of them have filled right up. The volunteer instructor "is a native Spanish speaker who wants to give back to the community."

Smyrna is a town of 30,000 people. Census data suggest it might have fifteen hundred Latinos. But many county schools, Sherry said, begin Spanish instruction as early as kindergarten. And there are a lot of homeschoolers who have turned out for the library‘s classes, too.

Down in Daphne, Alabama, a suburb of Mobile on the Gulf Coast, the story is "Come to the library, learn Spanish." Here, too, native-English-speaking chamacos of two different age groups are invited to come to the library to have fun in Spanish with a teacher who grew up in Mexico and Puerto Rico.

"Also," Daphne PL Director Tonja Young told the paper, "we thought it would be nice for patrons with Hispanic heritage" to bring their children to these programs."

And in Ohio, the Columbus Dispatch recently reported that youngsters are flocking to Spanish-language story hours. Credit for this phenomenon goes to the trio of moms who comprise a group called Spanish Storytimes that last year reached more than 6,000 kids, and gave away a couple thousand Spanish-language books, mostly in libraries of Central Ohio.

The group’s founder wanted to create activities suitable for her bilingual children. While most of the audience are Anglos seeking exposure to Spanish, there is more to it than that:

"Aliza Ravelo, 5, and brother Marcos, 10, are regulars at the Westland library. While they have attended an English story hour, the Spanish version affirms the importance of the language of their family, said their mother, Sonia.

The native of the Dominican Republic, 36, wants her children to see "that other people speak Spanish, too. It's not just something we speak at home."

While some immigrant families think that studying and speaking their native language will take away from developing English skills, Ravelo uses the library readings to show her children that the languages are equally important.

"I want them to know both," she said. "It's a plus. You understand more when you speak two languages."

Posted by Bruce Jensen on February 20, 2008 | Comments (0)