Schools in Morris County, NJ and
Prince William County, VA
Spanish for Native Speakers program
Prince William County, VA
Spanish for Native Speakers program
For the purpose of this project,
we have researched high schools in the Morris County, New Jersey and Prince
William County, Virginia. In Morris County, New Jersey,
there are twenty-one high schools and
only one offers the Spanish Native Speakers program, which is in the city of
Dover. According to the Census 2010, the Hispanic/Latino accounts for 69.4%
of the total population of Dover. Although the city of Morristown has a 34%
population of Hispanic/Latinos, they don’t
offer a Spanish for Native Speakers
program in that area.There are eleven high schools in Prince William County, Virginia, and four of them offer this type of program. The Hispanic/Latino accounts for 20.9% of the total population of Prince William County. The reason some schools doesn't offer the program has to do with the demographics of the school population. The other reason is that if a school doesn't have a sufficient amount of students to open a new course, they rather not have a separate class to accommodate those students.
The office of student learning in Prince William County,
Virginia has made the effort to create a committee of teachers who run this
program and adjust the Spanish Curriculum to accommodate the Spanish Speaking students
in the Spanish for Native Speaker class. No accommodations have been made for this type of students in the regular Spanish class. It
is sad that with the vast amount of students who continue to come to our
schools, we do not have any accommodations in the Spanish curriculum for the
Spanish Speaker. We continue to face the challenge.
In the state of Virginia and New Jersey, the Foreign Language curriculum is designed with
the goal that students will achieve linguistic proficiency and cultural understanding
in four areas: effective communication,
enhanced cultural understanding, expanded access information, and increased
global perspective. The Spanish Language curriculum is designed for the
scope and sequence levels I-IV. School divisions make revisions to the
curriculum by making accommodations to
the advanced levels of the target
language and align the curriculum to the
AP, IB, and even to the Cambridge program, in Virginia, to prepare students for college-level work in the target
language.
The goal is that the high levels
of these programs should be filled with
native speakers of Spanish. However, due to the increased amounts of
native speakers who do not progress through the levels of Spanish in a
consistent manner, there are very few students in the AP or IB classes. The
tremendous challenge is that some teachers and administrators don’t understand
the needs for this type of program for
Native speakers. Some teachers blame everyone else but themselves for trying to deal with this problem.
They blame the counselors for placing those students in a regular Spanish class
when they already speak the language but on the other hand, they don’t
understand that Native speakers need and want
to improve the literacy skills in the language.
