Teachers Bobbi Heppe, right, goes over the English vocabulary used in math for native Japanese speaker Satsuki Manhu, who has a fourth- and fifth-grader at Zukeran Elementary School on Camp Foster, Okinawa. (Megan McCloskey / S&S)
Teachers Bobbi Heppe, right, goes over the English vocabulary used in math for native Japanese speaker Satsuki Manhu, who has a fourth- and fifth-grader at Zukeran Elementary School on Camp Foster, Okinawa. (Megan McCloskey / S&S)
Preschoolers Alex Lee and Tae Young Lee, who are unrelated but who both have Korean mothers who speak limited English, paint pictures Thursday to help learn the English words for animals and colors. (Megan McCloskey / S&S)
CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa — All your life you’ve understood that a dog says “won won,” not “woof woof.”
And you’ve never seen a corrected school paper with three lines written under a letter or a triangle-shaped thingy sticking up between words.
Forget knowing the nuances of the language. For parents who speak English as a second language, just the small details — the details that native English speakers might not think twice about, such as proofreading symbols — can be a challenge when helping a child with schoolwork.
Take the sound an animal makes. Native English speakers might offer up “bark” or “woof” for a dog, but not “won” as the Japanese say. Most languages attribute unique sounds to animals, which makes it hard for a parent to help when a kindergartner’s homework deals with, say, barnyard animals.
Recognizing these difficulties, Zukeran Elementary School started a new parents’ group this year to help nonnative speakers understand what their children are learning and build the vocabulary necessary to assist them with schoolwork.
“I can’t imagine the frustration of your child coming home and you can’t help them,” said Bobbi Heppe, who teaches English as a second language at Zukeran. “If the primary caregiver doesn’t speak English, I want to provide them a service.”
Twice a week before school starts, Heppe has a handful of parents come to her classroom for a half hour of specialized lessons — an idea that district spokesman Henry Meyer said is unique in Department of Defense Dependents Schools on Okinawa.
“What we want to do is give the parents the vocabulary to get through the subject matter,” Heppe said.
During one class last month, she went over phonics with the parents, explaining, for example, that although there are only 26 letters in the English language, they have a combined 51 sounds. She also gave the parents a thesaurus and showed them how to read an English dictionary.
Another lesson dealt with adjectives, a common topic for elementary students. New speakers of a language often lack a rich vocabulary, which makes it difficult to help with those assignments, Heppe said.
“Many parents knew the name for a lemon but not to call it sour,” she said.
This month, the focus has shifted to showing the parents what type of homework their children will get and what the expectations are for different assignments.
On Thursday, Heppe gave a tutorial on the math textbook. She outlined the vocabulary used in math — a crucial component of helping students with the overall concepts.
For example, while parents easily recognize the different kinds of graphs, nonnative speakers might not know that in English they’re called bar graphs, line graphs and pie charts. Or that the word “sum” is the word for the solution to an addition problem.
“It’s helping a lot,” said Satsuki Manhu, a native Japanese speaker with a fourth- and fifth-grader at the school. “There are many words (from her daughters’ homework) that I don’t understand.”
