Several hundred parents, children and educators attended the first Bilingual Fair of Los Angeles on campus Sunday, featuring roughly 40 exhibits from bilingual and multilingual schools and publishers in the Los Angeles area.
Hosted by the UCLA Department of French and Francophone Studies, the fair aimed to reach bilingual parents in Los Angeles who were interested in bilingual education programs for their children, said Ludovic Romano, a teacher at Le Lycée Français de Los Angeles. The school is a private bilingual international school that had an exhibit at the fair.
“It’s becoming customary for many people to speak two or even three languages,” Romano said. “Parents … want their kids to be able to communicate as soon as possible, so that as soon as they enter university, they have competency (in different languages).”
The majority of the exhibits were from French-speaking dual-language or international schools, but a total of eight languages were represented at the fair, including Chinese, Spanish and Italian, said Emmanuel Saint-Martin, founder and president of French Morning, a Web magazine for French people living in the United States that sponsored the fair.
“The idea was to put together as many languages as possible,” Saint-Martin said.
French Morning reached out to the French department at UCLA, which agreed to host the event, Saint-Martin said.
Other exhibits at the fair included those by the Sylvan Learning Center, the Chinese Language Academy and the All Souls World Language Catholic School. The exhibits offered information on their schools and programs to prospective parents and students.
Nathalie Escudier, a Los Angeles resident, attended the event with her son, a student at the Lycée International de Los Angeles, a bilingual school that had an exhibit at the fair.
“I want to see what else the (bilingual) network has to offer to French citizens,” Escudier said. “I’m a French teacher as well, so it was interesting meeting French schools and seeing what they have to offer.”
The educators at the fair also held panels on bilingual education and on ways to create dual language programs in public schools, Saint-Martin said.
“There’s been a resurgence of interest lately in the bilingual experience,” said Rebecca Bernard, a UCLA alumna and enrichment director for Word City Center, a dual-language preschool that had an exhibit at the fair. “A lot of (the fair visitors) are international parents that want to continue exposing their kids to their cultures, and are looking for locals ways to do that.”