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Ken Schneider and Marcia Jarmel (Photo: Najib Joe Hakim)
A new PBS documentary profiles four kids who are attending dual immersion public schools in San Francisco. The filmmakers are husband and wife team Ken Schneider and Marcia Jarmel. Their own kids go to a dual immersion school and speak fluent Chinese. Patrick Cox has part four of our ‘Learning in Two Languages’ series. Download MP3
SPEAKING IN TONGUES TRAILER from PatchWorks Films on Vimeo.
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MARCO WERMAN: This week, we’ve been reporting on American students going to school and learning math, science and other subjects in a foreign language. Our final report is on a documentary called Speaking in Tongues. It depicts fours kids in San Francisco. Each one of them is growing up bilingual. As The World’s Patrick Cox reports.
PATRICK COX: There are many reasons to learn a foreign language. There are the ones that parents think about. And then there are the others.
JADEN JARMEL-SCHNEIDER: Most Chinese people if you walk into a store, they don’t usually see a Caucasian boy speaking Chinese fluently, so I get a lot of free stuff, so that’s pretty fun.
COX: Jaden Jarmel-Schneider and his brother go to dual immersion public schools in San Francisco. They take some classes in Chinese, others in English. Their parents don’t speak Chinese.
JARMEL-SCHNEIDER: Also, me and my brother, if we have secrets and my parents are around, that’s another great use of a different language.
COX: So many good reasons to speak a foreign language. When Jaden’s parents sent their elder son to Chinese immersion school, friends and family were perplexed. Four years later, when they did the same with Jaden, people around them nodded in approval.
KEN SCHNEIDER: And we looked at each other and thought well what’s going on here. We haven’t changed. The school hasn’t changed. But what had changed was the world.
COX: This is Ken Schneider. He and Jaden’s mom Marcia Jarmel happen to be filmmakers. So they made a movie, not about their kids, but about four other students in San Francisco public schools who are also doing much of their learning in a second language. Their reasons for learning are different and each touches on a big theme. There’s the son of Mexican immigrants who never went to school themselves but now want their boy to learn in English and Spanish. There’s the son of white middle class parents, who want their boy exposed to Chinese culture. There’s a black kid who lives with his mother in public housing. She says learning Chinese will be a way out and a way in. And there’s Kelly Wong.
SCHNEIDER: Kelly Wong is a second generation Chinese-American whose parents lost the language that her grandparent’s speak and they lost it to assimilation and probably some degree of shame for having been different. Her grandparents, their English is modest at best, so for her and her family the issue is very urgent that if they don’t bring the language back into the household they will be severing not only language, but also the cultural lineage in that family.
COX: The movie unabashedly champions the idea of raising kids bilingually. But it also shows how hard it is, in the face of what appears to be the prevailing public view that it’s not a good thing. Most states in the US have some form or other of an official English law on their books. The film seeks to put arguments against bilingual learning to rest by citing recent research. Research that suggests that the bilingual brain has an edge over the single-language brain. Yet some of most poignant moments in the movie come when doubt sets in.
SPEAKING SPANISH
COX: Here a parent at a Spanish immersion school pleads with teachers for more English and less Spanish. A different parent at the same school raises another concern.
MALE SPEAKER: In the cafeteria there was great art on the wall. Everyone from Latin America. Do they learn about American heroes? I didn’t see Martin Luther King, for example, on the cafeteria wall. Are the teachers aware that, that they’re in the US?
COX: But the fundamental debate takes place at a family banquet in a Chinese restaurant. It’s between two white Americans who are related by marriage to Kelly Wong. The first person to speak is Kelly’s great aunt. She doesn’t think Kelly should be attending a Chinese immersion school.
FEMALE SPEAKER: This country. So much is offered to the children to speak other languages. We don’t have to teach them [INDISCERNIBLE]. We really don’t. It’s taking away from their other curriculum and in America we should speak English. This is America. I don’t think I should be paying my taxes for someone else to learn a language. My son’s giving me the evil eye.
MALE SPEAKER: You’ve got a global economy. You’re able to travel to different countries, you’ve got to be able to communicate with someone in their language. Not everyone’s going to be how we were. Starting here, staying here, not having much contact outside of what we have. They’ve got to have more tools.
COX: The film, of course, sides with that argument. Filmmaker Ken Schneider says he sympathizes with Kelly’s great aunt and many millions of people with similar views. But he says they’re wrong.
SCHNEIDER: I think these folks don’t have all the information. And the challenge again is for Kelly and her family to withstand the slings and arrows of the well-meaning family members and to still exceed the expectations of their family and their teachers.
COX: As for Kelly, she’s come up with yet another reason for learning a second language. On the basketball court, she and her schoolmates call their plays in Chinese. For The World, I’m Patrick Cox.
WERMAN: To see images from Speaking In Tongues and to find out when the film will air on your PBS station, go to TheWorld.org.
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