Melinda Kitchen, ESOL teacher, teaches students English through what she calls "multiple intelligences"

A student doesn't just learn a new language through ears and eyes, but also through taste, touch and movement.

At least, that's the idea behind learning with "multiple intelligences." Melinda Kitchen, ESOL teacher at Meadowlark Elementary School, gave a presentation on this at the annual conference of the National Association of Bilingual Educators, held Feb. 7-11 in San Jose, Calif.

"I had to submit a proposal, and it was reviewed by staff," Kitchen said. "They want to see educators who are actually working in the bilingual field. I was very honored to be chosen."

In her presentation, she provided examples of using kinesthetic (movement), environmental, music and other avenues to help students whose dominant language is not English to learn it.

"Research has been done showing that applying this approach to language development will help students learn a language faster and more proficiently," Kitchen said. "If my students hear it, see it and do it, they learn so much more than if I just stand at the front of the room and lecture."

Take the letter A. "If I'm teaching A, we'll pull out things that begin with the letter A, eat something that begins with the letter A, sing a song about the letter and dance to it," Kitchen said. "Somewhere in all that, you will hit something that applies to each child."

A 1999 Pittsburg State University graduate, she is in her third year at Meadowlark. Previously she taught in Blue Valley and Olathe.

"They've been seeing an influx of immigrant families in the past 10 years," Kitchen said. "These families aren't just settling in California, Texas and Arizona now, they're moving further north and east."

She now has around 30 youngsters in her program. "I've got eight in my kindergarten group, and before, I never had more than four or five in a grade level," Kitchen said.

She has a pull-out program, taking youngsters from their regular classrooms in grade level groups.

"With the kindergarten group, we're doing basics such as body parts, colors, names and places in the school - what you could call 'survival English'," Kitchen said. "I try to stay away from clip art or drawings, and take photographs instead."

For example, one bulletin board in her room features photos of students pointing to their eyes, mouths, arms, toes, etc.

"In the fourth and fifth grades we may do more enrichment," Kitchen said. "These students may have good social English, but their academic language may be lagging behind. Some of my students are very close to exiting this program."

The younger students are when they start the ESOL program, the better. "There are now programs in Head Start and the Family Resource Center, and that's wonderful," she said. "And the sooner we get the children, the sooner we get their parents. We have students who are 8, 9 or 10 who are translating for their parents at the doctor, at the store, and so on."

Most of the students in her program have Spanish as their dominant language, but other speakers of other languages are also becoming more common in this area. "We have a large Marshallese population here, and we're getting some Arabic, Korean, Russian and Chinese as well," Kitchen said. "It would be wonderful to have a native speaker in all those languages to translate."

She said that she became in ESOL education naturally. "I'm originally from California, went to school in a bilingual classroom and was raised in a bilingual home," Kitchen said. "It can be pretty overwhelming for students who come here with no English and are immersed in an English classroom. It was very natural for me to feel an empathy for these kids, and I felt that I had something to offer them."

She said that attending the conference in San Jose was a wonderful experience. "I felt revived," Kitchen said. "My eyes were opened for me at the conference, to see my peers with the same objective viewpoint from across the United States. What I do here is well worth it."

The Morning Sun, (www.morningsun.net) February 20, 2007

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