Educational Partnership Celebrates Young Bilingual Students

Learning a foreign language is about more than the language itself. At Duquesne University’s Department of Modern Languages, students are encouraged to immerse themselves in cultural communities outside their own to enhance their experience.

For many Spanish language students recently, this community manifests in the form of 4-and-5-year-olds at Beechwood Elementary School in Beechview.For two years, Lucía Osa-Melero has been bringing her university students to the south Pittsburgh neighborhood to visit and exchange knowledge with young, bilingual students. 

She’s dubbed the program “Reading to Play, Playing to Read,” because the time they spend together, she said, is both fun and educational.For several weeks after school each April, Duquesne students interact with the Beechwood children, where they play games, speak Spanish and learn about different topics. This year, the participants talked about health and nutrition.

Read more here Pittsburgh's NPR News Station

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