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Anchor Lead:Young children learn languages easily. And yet, in Washington state, less than a quarter of public elementary schools offer foreign language instruction to their students. The typical program is after school, for only an hour or two a week-- not enough to produce any kind of fluency.

There is a better model for teaching young kids foreign languages. It’s called “language immersion” where kids spend much or all of their days learning in a second language.

In the final installment of our Learning Curve series on foreign languages in the schools, KPLU’s Deborah Wang has this profile of one award-winning language immersion school in Seattle.

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It’s the first day of kindergarten at John Stanford International School. The children are sitting on a rug, listening to their teacher speak to them in a language that most don’t understand.

But then, with a combination of gestures, repetition, and song, somehow the kids catch on.

For the next six years, these kids will spend half of their days learning Spanish. Not just language and literature, but science, math, music, and other subjects as well. From the first day, English is not to be spoken in the Spanish language classroom.

It is a tough assignment, but according to Principal Karen Kodama, it is something the kids learn to do.

Karen Kodama: They come in kindergarten and they figure: “Well one teacher is speaking a language I don't understand, but I guess it’s ok because my parents have put me here, so this must be what school's about.” And so the children don't see it as anything unusual, they think it’s part of what school is about.

The school is the only one of its kind in Seattle, and one of only a handful in the state. It offers a half day immersion program in either Spanish or Japanese, and a heavily international focus to its curriculum.

Language immersion is based on research that shows young children have a natural facility to learn foreign languages. They master them quickly and intuitively, and they can learn to speak without an accent. Principal Kodama says learning a foreign language actually makes these kids smarter.

Karen Kodama: The research shows that children who learn a second language are better at problem solving because they are constantly trying to figure out: “What is that teacher asking me?” These are children who persevere and don’t give up because half the day they have to keep pushing themselves and figuring out what’s going on.

That’s exactly what students in the second grade Japanese class are doing. They start out the day at the blackboard playing number games, counting to 100 by eights. Japanese is one of the world’s most difficult languages to learn, and the kids work hard to master the complex system of writing. One way they practice is by exchanging emails with school children in Japan.

Hiromi Pingri: (reading Japanese) What’s that mean? We would send them questions and they corrected our spelling.

Teacher Hiromi Pingri says the kids’ connection with Japanese school children has made the language come alive.

Hiromi Pingri: They want to read, it’s not like a teacher saying you have to read, you have to practice reading. No, they want to communicate with kids with the picture on computer. So, that was really motivating factor for them.

It is not easy to measure how successfully these kids are learning the language. Pingri says they read from the same textbooks as second graders in Japan, although their writing skills and vocabulary lag behind. The students here do take the standardized test, the WASL, and their scores have not been stellar.

Principal Kodama says the numbers are skewed by the large percentage of immigrant children who attend. But for many parents at John Stanford, how the kids perform on standardized tests is not their highest priority.

Wednesday night is Spanish night, and the parents come to have some fun practicing the language that their kids are all learning. Incredibly, many of them already speak one or two or even three other languages, and they want their kids to be multilingual as well.

Jeanette Norris’ son was one of the first groups of kids to join the school.

Jeanette Norris: This kind of program is invaluable, there's no price you can put on it. Its absolutely essential to be successful in the world--to have some sense of what is going on in the world, that children start to learn at a very, very early age what’s out there.

And many parents in Seattle agree. The school is one of the most oversubscribed in the district, with a waiting list of more than 100 students.

Other schools are hoping to replicate the model. Hamilton International Middle School this year has its first Spanish immersion class, which many of the John Stanford graduates are attending. The school will start Japanese immersion in 2007. One south end elementary school is exploring the possibility of starting a language immersion program in Mandarin.

But language immersion is an expensive proposition. The programs require more personnel than a typical school and extensive staff training. In this era of strained school budgets, the question is, can they find the money to bring languages into the lives of the very young.

Deborah Wang, KPLU News, Seattle.