Pueden encontrar la versión en español aquí.
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Spelling is an endurance sport. As the 10th annual Spanish spelling bee at Weber State University unfolded Wednesday, kids tapped their sneakers on the wooden floor of a small auditorium stage. They doodled on their boards while waiting for their turn. After spelling each word, they heard the ding of a bell telling them they got it right or the low “incorrecto” from the judges.
Isabel Asensio, a Weber State professor of Spanish, translation and interpretation, started the bee because she doesn’t see many opportunities for kids to celebrate their bilingual education.
“It's the same as when you like dancing and you do a show,” she said. “[It's] the culmination of what you are doing and what you've been rehearsing.”
In front of the velvet maroon curtain, some kids towered over the microphones. Others stood on their tiptoes to answer.
Maríajosé Fajardo’s fifth-grade daughter, Ema González, qualified for the competition by placing second at Alta View Elementary’s spelling bee. The family moved to Sandy last year. Fajardo said it’s important for her kids to maintain their Spanish so they can keep in touch with the family in Chile.
“Lo ideal es que adquieran uno nuevo y no que pierdan el que ya existe.”
“Ideally, they learn a new language and don’t lose the one they already have,” she said in Spanish.
Though Spanish is phonetic, Asensio said its spellings can be tricky.
“The H is silent in Spanish, and there are a lot of words that have an H in the middle of the word. And if you don't know that the H is there, then you're going to misspell it,” she said.
Accent marks also complicate things. Then there’s the letter Y versus the double L. B and V can sound the same, and pronunciations vary by region.
Eleven-year-old González misheard the word for surgical tape. She spelled esparadrapo as esparadraco. That mistake landed her in fifth place.
González cried on her way out of the auditorium. Her parents pulled her in close and told her she did a good job. Spelling in Spanish is hard, she said.
“Puedo aprender de las palabras que me equivoque. Y luego no volver a cometer el mismo error.”
“I can learn from the words I got wrong,” she said. “And then not make the same mistake again.”
This year’s champion was Nicolas Medina Policarpo, a sixth grader at Canyon Crest Elementary in Provo.
“This is an opportunity for him,” said his mom, dual-language teacher Yanina Policarpo. “All the challenges he has faced, coming to a different country — so he can achieve anything that he has in mind as a goal.”
Those challenges, she said, included adapting to a new school system and making new friends after leaving Peru in 2023.
Medina Policarpo said he only slept three hours the night before the bee. All that studying left him tired and nervous on stage. After winning with the word privilegiado, which means privileged, he planned to celebrate with his parents, though he hadn’t yet decided how to spend his $150 in prize money.
His mom said multilingualism gives students the opportunity to interact with other people and cultures.
“In this case, they learn about my culture,” she said. “I feel very proud that my students and my kids, also my children, keep using the language, the mother tongue.”
Spanish is the largest of Utah’s dual-language immersion programs. Roughly half the state’s districts offer it. Days are split equally between Spanish and English, and students come from a variety of backgrounds.
There’s some selection bias, according to the Utah State Board of Education, but dual-language students outperform their monolingual peers in academic and language skills.
In an upstairs classroom, other students drew from their Spanish skills in a different competition, one that focused on role play. They each read a prompt and acted out a scenario with a partner.
Fernando Mateo’s daughter Olivia, a sixth grader at North Davis Preparatory Academy, was one of this year’s winners. Mateo, who is from Spain, said he knows what it’s like to feel he can’t express himself in a new language. Bilingualism, he said, opens doors to helping people.
Macy Lipkin is a Report for America corps member who reports for KUER in northern Utah.