New World of Cultures, Tongues Test Teachers : Ethnicity: O.C. schools’ minority enrollment is nearly 50%. Dozens of languages are now heard in classes.

A teacher can walk into a classroom in the Fullerton School District and face students who speak 12 different languages, not to mention a number of dialects.

Instead of talking about neighborhoods, students chat about their native lands. Rather than eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, they are munching on brown bagged rice and kimchi. Schoolyard clamor has become increasingly spoken in Cantonese and Farsi.

Like other districts, these changes did not happen overnight in Fullerton. The number of immigrant and minority students has been increasing in the county for years.

But now, for the first time, Orange County’s minority student enrollment is on the brink of passing 50% of the total county student population. Minority students now make up 49.2% of the 391,000 students in the county--compared to 37.7% in 1986--and are expected to become the majority of the student enrollment in the 1992-93 school year.

In a county that is accustomed to homogeneity and classrooms filled with children who speak fluent English, educators are being forced to come to grips with the language barrier and the frantic pace of ethnic changes in their classrooms. And now that minority students are on the brink of becoming the majority, the question is, are Orange County public schools ready for the challenge of diversity?

Clearly, some districts are. The Santa Ana Unified School District has long had a majority population of ethnic minorities--the district is 92% minority--and is considered at the forefront of bilingual education.

But for other districts, especially those in south Orange County, where the influx of minorities has been a more recent phenomenon--in less than five years, the minority student population in the Saddleback Valley Unified School District has grown from 13.5% to 21%--the question of how to deal with students who speak different languages and who come from cultures that may seem mysterious to the local populace is still being widely debated.

“There’s a misconception that Orange County is made up of just one group of people,” said Maria S. Quezada, coordinator for Saddleback Unified’s bilingual program. “It’s not just Santa Ana any more. It’s the whole county that is changing.”

As recently as three years ago, there were only 90 students in the district’s Limited English Proficiency classes, Quezada said. Now the district has 340 students, the size of a small school.

While teaching students to speak English will be one of the major efforts for school districts in coming years, ironing out culture clashes may prove to be the most daunting task. While children can be taught to understand the language of their teachers, it is often more difficult for a teacher to be taught to understand the culture of their students.

Take a story told by a teacher to Ellen Ballard, an English development coordinator at Fullerton School District. The teacher, Ballard said, had been trying to get two Asian boys to work together. The boys, however, adamantly refused.

What the teacher failed to understand was the difference between the two boys. They refused to cooperate, Ballard said, because one was from Vietnam and the other from Laos, two countries which have had long-term disputes.

“The teacher told me she was going crazy trying to get them to talk to each other,” Ballard said. “She assumed that because they are Asians they would get along perfectly. We told her that just because the kids fell into an ethnic group, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they share the same culture and background.”

Ballard, who runs a workshop similar to those run by the county Department of Education and other districts to help teachers understand cultural differences, said teachers often come to her seminars with such misconceptions. Too often, teachers try to force the children to assimilate, Ballard said, which could result in children losing touch with their culture.

With such a significant demographic change in such a small span of time, there is likely to be resentment toward minority students, particularly those who cannot speak English, said Barbara Allen, a coordinator for the county Department of Education’s English as a second language program.

Indeed, there are some ill feelings toward English as a second language programs themselves in some circles.

Rosemarie Avila, a recently elected Santa Ana Unified district trustee, said English should play a stronger role in bringing different students together.

“People think that bilingual education is churning out students who are fluent in both languages,” Avila said. “But bilingual education is really a misnomer. We are turning out students who are not proficient in either English or Spanish, and this is handicapping our Spanish-speaking students.”

Spanish and Vietnamese continue to be the dominant languages other than English. Five years ago, Latinos made up 24% of the county’s student population, and are now at 33%. The number of Asians has also increased in the past five years from 36,141 to 47,191. Teachers and students have also more recently encountered an increasing number of students who speak Korean, Cambodian and Chinese.

Other languages such as Gujarati (a language spoken in India), Pashto (spoken in Afghanistan), Urdu (spoken in Pakistan) and Visayan (spoken in the Visayas, a group of islands in the Philippines) are heard less often, but the challenge of teaching English to children who speak those languages can be great because bilingual aides in such obscure languages are often not available, as they are for Spanish and Vietnamese.

As a result, teachers have been hard-pressed to come up with innovative ways to teach classes that sound more like Babel than Orange County.

Teresa Green and Sharon Quirk, teachers at Orangethorpe Elementary School in Fullerton, are among those who are trying to devise new methods. Both instruct a class that combines students from first to sixth grade. On one wall of the classroom, they have pinned up self-portraits of the children, all done in different hues of crayon. None of the students speak English fluently; instead they speak Cantonese, Romanian and Greek.

Green and Quirk teach by using body language and visual aids. They make sure the children share their own cultural experiences. It seems to work. The children are picking up English and retaining their own language.

“We want them to be proud of themselves and their own languages,” Green said. “The kids have so much to offer to us. We’ve been so narrow-minded for so long. Now it’s time to draw on other people’s experiences.”

Then there’s teacher Maria Azucena Vigil, who is teaching kindergarten students in a bilingual class. Vigil, the 1992 state Teacher of the Year, was recently named one of four finalists for the national Teacher of the Year award and was praised by State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig for her ability to reach out to children in their primary language and teach them English.

For some, that variety of languages means an opportunity to expose children early to an increasingly multicultural world.

“Orange County’s emerging diversity can be a source of the county’s undoing if there are constant conflicts with different groups,” said Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission. “But it is the greatest opportunity to teach our children about the world and the fact that there are people of all nationalities living close together. It’s proof that we are truly becoming a cosmopolitan county.”

Martha Fluor, a recently elected Newport--Mesa Unified district board trustee who ran on a platform that included calling for more bilingual classes, agreed that students must be taught to respect people from different nationalities.

“This diversity can only enrich our community,” she said. “We need to embrace all cultures and can’t segregate. My own children will be more enriched learning Spanish and being bilingual.”

But while some may be enriched, others may be enraged. The county’s new diversity has already led to racial tension on campuses, most recently at Westminster High School, where Latino and Asian students have clashed.

Schools are natural places for ethnic tensions to erupt because it may be the only place where students are forced to interact with those who are different from them, said Loren O’Connor, a psychologist at San Clemente High School.

“There’s a certain degree of discomfort because there is misunderstanding,” O’Connor said. “It’s simply ignorance.”

But there are programs that help lessen the tensions. The County Human Relations Commission runs an inter-ethnic relations program that encourages students to share their own experience of prejudice and cultural background, Kennedy said. Students then conclude the program by working on an ongoing plan to decrease tension on their campuses.

Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton tried the program after the campus saw a rapid change in its student population. When fights broke out between different groups, principal George Giokaris asked brought the inter-ethnic relations program to the school.

“The tension between ethnic groups was pronounced,” Kennedy said. “It was between Asians and Anglos, as well as African-Americans and Hispanics. Rather than attempt to avoid the problem, the principal took it head-on and now the campus is getting along fine.”

Times researcher Danny Sullivan contributed to this report.

Language Challenge in the Classroom

One of every four public school students in Orange County cannot speak English fluently. There are at least 47 languages, ranging from Spanish to Arabic, spoken in the county’s public schools. Special programs help elementary and high school teachers deal with this ever-growing educational challenge.

What They Speak

Spanish: 72,022

Vietnamese: 9,981

Korean: 2,353

Chinese *: 1,868

Cambodian: 1,175

Japanese: 878

Other: 5,778

Total: 94,055

* Mandarin, Cantonese, and other dialects

Some of the Other Non-English Languages Spoken

American Indian languages, Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, Burmese, Croatian, Dutch, Farsi, Filipino dialects, French, German, Greek, Guamanian, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Laotian, Marshallese, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Serbian, Thai, Tongan, Turkish, Urdu, Visayan

How They’ve Grown

Number of county students compared to those statewide with limited English proficiency: 1991-92

California : 986,462

Orange County : 94,055

Tips for Communicating

Many teachers are learning to communicate with students who do not speak English through county-sponsored workshops. Techniques include:

* Body Language: Gestures, such as using fingers while counting, help students better understand spoken English.

* Visual Aids: Pictures and hands-on materials are promoted over textbooks and ditto sheets. Food groups can be taught by using actual fruits and vegetables, for example.

* Classroom Culture: Lessons can relate to a child’s background. The American Revolution can be taught by comparing the subject to a child’s native country.

SOURCE: Orange County Department of Education