The response comes quickly and without hesitation from a Kindergartener in Mariano Lizano’s classroom at Sherwood Forest Elementary.

Lizano just asked the youngster why she needs to leave a few minutes ahead of her peers, and she immediately produces a response (and accompanying adult) sufficient for her teacher, who wishes her a good afternoon as she walks out.

Similar exchanges take place in classrooms around the country on a daily basis, but few happen in the student’s second language.

For students in the Bellevue School District’s dual-language immersion program, they are the sign of a changing present and for the rest of the district, a glimpse into the future.

Building a plan

Heidi LaMare came to the Bellevue School District three years ago after spending time in Issaquah and Seattle and has been in the field of language curriculum for 20 years. One of her main attractions to the BSD was its willingness to explore forward-thinking options like dual-language teaching.

“There was a lot of parent interest and teachers understand,” she said.

Lizano’s class at Sherwood Forest and six more like it in the district at Stevenson, Ardmore and Lake Hills are operating in 2012-13 with six more beginning next year. When the program began with Lizano’s class last year the mission was simple: teach in two languages, with roughly half the students being native-English speakers and the other half native-speakers of the target language, in Lizano’s case, Spanish.

The curiosity in the community coincided with emerging scientific and academic research suggesting children who begin second-language acquisition at younger ages are not only more likely to retain that knowledge, but see cognitive benefits across the board.

“It was one of those perfect storms with things coming together,” LaMare said.

Laying the foundation

Critical to the district’s mission of dual-language instruction is emerging research in language acquisition and the benefits of bilingualism as it relates to age.

According to Julia Herschensohn, the chair of the linguistics department at the University of Washington, human beings begin learning language even in the womb and are more predisposed to language acquisition as youngsters.

“Everybody learns a first language without even knowing how it happens,” Herschensohn said. “If babies are exposed to two languages equally, they grow in the same way.”

While learning a second language is attainable as a teenager or even adult, certain elements of speech such as response time can never reach the level of those who learn as young children or natively. Herschensohn has presented on countless studies and volumes of data and said even fluent adult speakers lack the reaction time of native speakers or those who began their second-language acquisition as children.

“Early bi-linguals can be pretty much identical in reaction time to native learners,” she said. “Adult learners, even if they are very proficient and have reactions that are the same quality, you can’t expect to get native reaction time.”

For Lizano and other dual-language teachers, taking the instruction into Spanish or Mandarin not only expands the base for native-English speaking students, it helps reinforce the value of the target language to its own native speakers.

Lizano was born in Costa Rica before spending his childhood in Paraguay and later studying at Illinois Wesleyan University. His introduction to teaching came in Chicago, where he earned a bi-lingual endorsement and taught two years in a bi-lingual program before coming to Bellevue and operating the pilot Kindergarten class. He said while the program makes it challenging to communicate at times, the long term benefits for students both in the classroom and eventually the workforce make it worthwhile.

“We tell parents to take it slow, don’t tell your child to say something in Spanish after the first day of school,” Lizano said. “Even in the most unexpected situations, it will show up.”

A glimpse of the future

While the cultural benefits of the program for both native-English and native-Spanish or Mandarin speakers are obvious – students are shown the inherent value of their language and culture – the real payoff, according to the school district and others in the field, comes well down the road when they enter a workforce that has an increasing need for bi-lingual speakers.

Sadia Habib is a family care physician at Redmond’s Overlake Medical Center and a native of Pakistan, where she lived and studied before moving to the United States to complete her residency. Near the Microsoft campus and in one of the Eastside’s most rapidly developing ethnic enclaves, Habib said her ability to communicate with patients and their family members in Hindi or Urdu has been vital, especially with the older generation.

“When parents are visiting and have medical problems, there is a huge gap in communication,” she said.

Habib said she treats only one to a few patients per week who cannot communicate in English, along with those who are visiting or new to the country. One recent patient was unable to find the source of her joint pain and nausea, even with her daughter playing impromptu translator.

“I said, ‘I can speak your language,'” Habib said. “She opened up and a lot of her problems were easier to understand. Things do get lost when you’re translating and it is double the amount of time.”

Bellevue’s demographics have been in flux for the past several years as the city has grown into a major business and cultural hub.

The future of its school district and neighborhoods will likely depend increasingly on bi-lingual communication in coming years, and according to the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s records, the district is already made up of 51.7 percent non-white students. More than 30 percent of students are Asian and another 10.5 percent is Hispanic, which is one of the reasons the BSD began its program with Spanish and Mandarin as the offerings.

While the BSD program has only Kindergartners and first graders, administrators including LaMare last year visited a school in Minnesota to meet with a group of high school seniors who had been part of a dual-language immersion program since Kindergarten. The meeting was both inspiring and reassuring for those inside the district.

“The kids were saying they felt like they could do any career,” LaMare said. “The language piece just becomes part of the overall confidence and feeling secure in their options.”

If all goes according to plan, Bellevue could soon find itself the hosts of such interactions. “I would hope we would get to that point,” LaMare said.

For Lizano and his students, the benefits of the program crop up every day and in a variety of circumstances.

Whether responding to a math equation in unison or learning the value of one another’s cultures through group projects, Lizano said after a sometimes trying first year in the program, his students are growing exponentially in language acquisition and cultural competency.

“It is fascinating to see how they work together,” he said. “They are able to understand each other and it is a very interesting synergy.”