Spanish unlocks doors to other languages in Cal State program

Carla Rivera:

Priscilla Castro grew up enthralled with French culture despite understanding few words of the movies and music in which she delighted.

Now Castro's facility with Spanish, which her family spoke at home, is serving as an unlikely bridge to mastering le Français in a unique Cal State Long Beach program designed to exploit Spanish speakers' existing language skills.

"I'm not 100% fluent, but I can hold a conversation," said Castro, 21, a journalism major. "A lot of things in Spanish are very similar, although because I learned Spanish at home, I didn't know a lot of the grammatical rules. So learning French is actually helping me to improve my Spanish grammar."

The French for Hispanophones program was developed more than five years ago but recently surged in popularity at the Long Beach campus, where more than 30% of students are Latino.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at January 7, 2012 1:13 AM
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