Students Aim For 2‑Language ​“Seal”

Nour Al Zouabi, a Syrian refugee, has quickly picked up a new language — and is now about to prove it, as part of the first wave of New Haven high school students seeking to earn a state-sanctioned ​“seal of biliteracy.”

When Nour first arrived at Hillhouse High School, she didn’t speak any English. She had to communicate with her ESL tutor through sign language, throwing up her hands when she didn’t understand.

She tried to learn English by watching videos of college tours on YouTube and ​“The Good Doctor” and ​“New Amsterdam” on television. And she joined the math team to chat with teammates about numbers, ​“a language that everyone can understand.”

“Coming to America was not an easy journey, and to start learning English was not very easy,” Nour recalled. ​“I just started to speak a lot. People sometimes didn’t understand me, but it’s okay. Even if they are making fun of you today, tomorrow will change. Tomorrow, you will say it properly.”

Even though she has worked so hard on improving her English over the past three years, Nour has spent the last month reviewing old words, as she practices her native Arabic for a big upcoming test.

Thanks to a state law passed in 2017, high school graduates throughout Connecticut can now earn a ​“seal of bilteracy.”

The seal, a gold circle, is stamped on their diplomas certifying their proficiency in both English and another language, including foreign languages, sign language and indigenous languages.

For Nour, receiving the seal of bilteracy would validate her skill in two languages, which she has now had plenty of practice in as the family’s go-to translator.

It would also validate her native language itself as important to learn.

“A lot of kids just keep focusing on English. I understand it’s important to learn, but you also have to keep what you have. This is what makes you special,” Nour said. ​“What you have and what you learn — connect them together and they make you who you are.”

Starting Small

Last year, New Haven quietly piloted the program at Sound School, where six students passed their exams, said Jessica Haxhi, the district’s world languages supervisor. Haxhi has been leading the effort.

This year the program has expanded to Wilbur Cross and James Hillhouse, where close to 240 students — most of them testing in their native language — have registered, Haxhi said. They’ll take exams in a range of languages, like Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Bengali, Korean, French, Tamil, Turkish and Italian, she said.

The biliteracy tests generally cost about $20, though for uncommon languages they can range up to $150, Haxhi said. This year, New Haven will cover the cost of the test for Hillhouse and Cross students with federal Title IV‑A funds.

Over the next two years, Haxhi said, the goal is to roll the biliteracy seal out to every high school in the city that wants to participate. Haxhi plans to build interest by creating a list of businesses that would be more likely to hire students and of local colleges that would award class credits or special placement for the seal.

In its guidelines for awarding the seal, the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE) said it wants to see that students are comfortable in ​“both social and academic use of the language, in all modes of communication”: reading and writing, speaking and listening. 

The state is looking for a baseline score of ​“Intermediate-Mid” on the Proficiency Scale of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

At that level, people can carry on ​“uncomplicated” and ​“straightforward” conversations, like talking about family members or asking for directions, the ACTFLP says. As they try to express themselves, people at that level might break up their speech with pauses and revisions, but they’ll be ​“generally understood by sympathetic interlocutors,” the ACTFLP adds.

The CSDE considers that proficiency level to be about the same as a 3 on the Advanced Placement or a 4 on the International Baccalaureate world language exams.

Twi & Akatek

Brianna Rivera, a student at Cross, said she’s ​“nervous” about meeting that standard.

Her family members, who are from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republican, never taught her Spanish. In middle school, she initially signed up for Chinese.

Now Rivera is an AP Spanish Language student at Cross, hoping to study to be a midwife at an in-state college next year. She wants the seal of biliteracy as ​“proof, showing that I learned,” Rivera said. ​“I want to show my family that I actually do know.”

When there’s not a standardized test, districts can come up with their own assessment. Haxhi has been working with Yale University, testing companies and dial-in translators to come up with a few tests, including for students who know Twi, an Akan language spoken in Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, and Akatek, a Mayan language spoken in Mexico and Guatemala.

Aiming For Perfect

Last Thursday afternoon, Nour stayed after school to go over the format of the test with one of the district’s tutors, El Mahfoud Bouhouche, a foreign-language teacher at Hill Regional Career High School who’s originally from Morocco.

They started off with a short practice test in reading, which was projected onto a whiteboard at the front of a darkened classroom. The questions quickly escalated in difficulty, from a thank-you card to a driver’s license to an article about space travel.

Nour, wearing a white headscarf, got up to read, then eliminated answers from the multiple-choice options. She aced it, getting all the reading questions right.

Over close to an hour and a half, Haxhi also helped them trouble-shoot a number of issues with some calls to the testing company.

Nour would be able to do the written portion by hand, rather than typing out words phonetically on an English keyboard. And she’d need to use standard Arabic, rather than the Syrian dialect she’s used to speaking and the Egyptian dialect that part of the listening portion of the test used to throw her off.

On her Arabic test, Nour won’t have to get every question right to pass/ ​“You don’t get more seal” for a higher score, Haxhi said. Nour is still aiming for a perfect score.

“I’m trying to really get the highest score I can. I didn’t have much to show in the SAT,” she explained. But ​“this test is for us, for kids not to be ashamed of the language that they speak. Even if others make fun of you, it’s still something that you can be proud of.”