English Spoken Here

Naturalization laws prodded the nation's early foreign-speaking immigrants to learn English, but the 700,000 Puerto Ricans who now form 10% of New York City's population were U.S. citizens when they arrived, and about half of them continue to speak nothing but Spanish. Last week, by the early dawning (6:307 a.m.) light of TV, some of them were learning their new home's native tongue. The program: WRCA-TV's Aqui se Habla Ingles (English Spoken Here).

Eye opener for the station's five-day-a-week educational curtain raiser is a bilingual newscast by Puerto Rican Newsman Jose Roman. Then Cuban-born, 31-year-old Teacher Clara Barbeito uses household objects and pictures to put across the day's vocabulary list. Listeners hear the words again when Roman closes class with a short, slowly spoken talk in English on how to get jobs in New York, or how to take advantage of the city's rent-control laws, or where to go for an inexpensive outing. Other Ingles encouragers: clips from English training films, a daily identification-translation contest.

Producer of the new school show is WRCA-TV's Patricia Farrar, 26, who gets up at 3 a.m. to shepherd her crew through a dry run at 4:45 before the live-camera lesson. Wearily, she alibis the rooster-rousing hour: 1) nothing else is programmed at 6:30, so the unsponsored show costs the station no revenue; and 2) many Puerto Ricans have jobs that get them up early or keep them out late. Also in the show's favor: 80% of New York's Puerto Rican families own television sets.

The first three shows drew 600 letters. Station Manager William Davidson announced that he would run the show indefinitely, backed up his words by okaying Producer Farrar's request for money to buy a coffee pot.

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