Originally published in the
Los Angeles Times, Sunday, April 20, 2003, California, Section
B, Page 16, written by Elaine Woo,
Times Staff Writer
Russell Campbell, an intrepid educator who promoted English language
instruction in countries such as Egypt and China and introduced a novel program to the United States that taught
elementary school students Spanish by immersing them in it all day long, has died.
He was 75.
The long time UCLA professor died March 30 of colon cancer at his home in Los Angeles.
"It's really wonderful what that man did."
Madeline Ehrlich, a former Culver City school board president and founder of the Advocates for Language Learning, a national lobbying group
The UCLA Language Resource Center is one of Russ' major contributions to UCLA and to the field of applied linguistics. The center is involved research projects that take place all over the world.
The UCLA Language Resource Center is a part of UCLA International Institute, a UCLA research and
teaching organization dedicated to international issues.
Russ' and Joy Kreeft Peyton's article titled, "Heritage Language Students: A Valuable Language Resource" was published in the ERIC Review
(Vol. 6, issue 1, ED437930). Please contact The Eric Review for more information.
Cahuenga Elementary school, a success story of a Korean-English immersion
program in LA Unified School District.
The UCLA Center for Korean Studies
has been collaborating with the LA Unified School District in the Korean immersion program.
Campbell's specialty was designing programs to teach modern languages. Much
of his work took place abroad,
most notably in China during
the 1980s.
He spearheaded the largest English language training program
in China after normalization of relations with the U.S.,
establishing
four centers that opened up pathways of communication with the
West by teaching English to hundreds of
Chinese scientists, scholars
and business leaders, many of whom had been isolated from developments
in their fields during
the Cultural Revolution.
At home, he was best known as the visionary behind an innovative
approach to language learning in elementary school
called immersion
education, in which school children as young as 5 receive all their
instruction -- from math to reading
-- from teachers who speak only Spanish to them.
He persuaded the Culver City Unified School District to
offer the first full
Spanish immersion program in the U.S. schools
in 1971. The nationally distinguished program, now in its
32nd year, inspired scores of schools around the country to embrace
the immersion approach.
"It's really wonderful what that man did," said Madeline Ehrlich, a former Culver City school board president and
founder of the
national lobbying group Advocates for Language Learning.
"Now 20% of the school population of Culver City is in immersion. Many students, like my own children, graduated from it,
then traveled
all over the world and learned other languages. What the
program did was open up the world to them."
Culver City's program "was a real pioneering effort," said
Andrew
D. Cohen, a University of Minnesota professor
who directs a national consortium
of language resource
centers. "Russ was very concerned about promoting English abroad. But he also was a promoter
of programs
that would get Americans comfortably fluent in other
languages."
A native of Keokuk, Iowa, who grew up in Kansas City, Mo., Campbell
became interested in Spanish in high school when
he had a summer job in a meat-packing house. Most of his co-workers were Latino.
"In this ambiente, this environment, I began to acquire some Spanish -- the profanity first," he told Lorena
Llosa in an interview last fall that will be published in an upcoming issue
of the journal
Issues in Applid Lingusitics.
"It was amazing: These people brought me into their lives. Suddenly,
I was going to their fiestas and homes,
and they were coming to my place. ... I became interested in and found it truly enjoyable
-- using another language and
gaining entry into another society."
He studied for two years at Baker University in Baldwin, Kan., where he met
his future wife, Marjorie. She survives him, along with son Roger of Versailles, Ky., daughter Paula Wainright
of Phoenix and two grandchildren.
After service in the Navy, Campbell transferred to Kansas State
Teachers College
(now Emporia State Univesity) in Emporia, Kan., where he majored in Spanish.
He
then worked as a high school Spanish teacher.
Finding few opportunities to improve his Spanish in Kansas, he
went abroad during the 1950s, developing English training
programs
for the United States Information Agency in Argentina and Costa
Rica. He later attended graduate school in
linguistics at University of Michigan, but interrupted his studies to conduct
fieldwork in applied linguistics in Thailand.
Campbell joined the UCLA faculty in 1964, teaching applied linguistics and
training students
to become teachers of English as a second language. During his more than three decades at UCLA, he also was the first
chairman of the Teaching English
as a Second Langauge
Department and introduced courses in Hindi,
Thai,
Tagalog and Vietnamese. He served
as director of the
university's Language Resource Program and
its Center for Language
Education and Research.
He became interested in immersion language training in 1971 after seeing a program in Montreal in which English-speaking
students
were taught in French. They emerged from the program after several
years, proficient in both languages.
Excited about the possibilities for immersion education in the
U.S., Campbell tried to interest officials in the
Los Angeles and
Santa Monica school districts but was turned down. In many districts,
the preferred model was bilingual
education, which offers academic
instruction in a student's native language but maintains English
fluency as the goal.
"Certainly, any child has the capacity to perform in several languages naturally," Campbell once said.
"It's only in America we find that odd."
When Culver City agreed
to try immersion, Campbell helped district officials
design the curriculum and monitor the results. The program eventually
evolved into what has become known as
"two-way immersion," mixing
native English and Spanish speakers with the goal of promoting
fluency in both languages for all
the children.
There are now 266 two-way immersion programs in U.S. schools
that teach Spanish and English, according to the
Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C.
Studies comparing immersion programs with other methods of language teaching, including bilingual education,
have shown that students who undergo immersion training are more proficient in the language
and have greater cultural
sensitivity. They also make overall academic gains.
Culver
City's El Marino School, a magnet
school that teaches all
its students with the immersion method, boasts some of the
highest
test scores in the district. The school, which also has
a Japanese immersion program, is so popular it chooses students
by lottery.
Campbell saw immersion education as an excellent way to preserve
languages in ethnic American
cultures where speaking only English
became the price of assimilation.
He called this use of immersion "heritage language education" and focused on building
support
for it in elementary schools, colleges and universities. He
believed that "heritage learners," because of their
familiarity
with languages they heard at home, have the ability to achieve
high
levels of proficiency that would make them valuable assets
in government and the global economy.
He was instrumental in the creation in 1990 of the nation's first
two-way Korean and English
immersion program in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The
program teaches Korean and English to a mix of students, including
many who
grew up hearing Korean but could not read or write it
and others whose home languages were English,
Spanish, or Tagalog.
Chin Kim, who directed the Korean-English program for six years,
said Campbell was especially
influential in overcoming Korean parents'
reservations. "This was a time when many Korean
parents felt
we should leave the Korean teaching to Saturday schools and families,"
she
said. "He brought in research showing the academic and cultural
benefits. That made a big difference."
Campbell, who did not accept any pay for his involvement
as an
advisor to the Korean-English program, took pleasure in learning
that its students perform well on standardized tests. "They
can compete with any gringo in any
area, plus, they are literate
in Korean," he told Llosa.
After launching immersion education in the U.S., Campbell resumed
his international work.
He lived in Cairo for two years during
the early 1970s, helping to design
a master's program for
English language
teachers at the American University. Over
the years, he worked in more than a dozen other
countries, including
Peru, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Taiwan and Japan.
In 1980, he led a UCLA delegation to China, making UCLA one of
the first U.S. universities to
establish ties with the People's
Republic after the end of the Cultural Revolution.
His efforts in China resulted in the creation of four English
language centers in
Guangzhou and Beijing. The goal of the
schools was to prepare Chinese leaders in science,
technology,
economics and business to work and study in the U.S. In addition
to teaching English, the centers offered cultural education to
help Chinese scholars relate to
their Western counterparts.
This aspect of the program raised the hackles of some Chinese
officials, who feared that their
students would adopt Western values. "There
were many tensions," said Margaret van
Naerssen, who directed one
of the Chinese centers, but Campbell, who was known for his folksy
and
engaging style, was able to ally them.
Campbell told Llosa that a measure of the program's effect was
that Zhongshan University in
Guangzhou now has at least a dozen
scholars with UCLA master's degree teaching English.
"We
did that," he said proudly. "They have probably now taught
a million
Chinese students and had some impact on their lives."