COLLEGES SAY SI TO SOAP OPERAS IN CLASS.

Byline: RACHEL URANGA Staff Writer

In Southern California, even "The Bold and the Beautiful" habla espanol. For five years, the top-running daytime soap opera has been simulcasting shows with dialogue in Spanish to compete with Spanish-language telenovelas.

Now its producers are taking the concept a step further - pitching dubbed shows to college professors as a better way to teach Spanish.

And it's working.

Instead of retreading conjugations and vocabulary lists, Pasadena City College students can talk about the steamy love affair of model Caitlin Ramirez (Kayla Ewell) and the disapproval of her fireman father Hector Ramirez (Lorenzo Lamas).

At College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, instructors are looking at how they can integrate saucy storylines into language laboratories and classroom lessons.

And all the while, producers are hitting up more schools.

"It brings a level of excitement of to things that are normally boring," said Keith Lee Montellano, a 24-year-old Spanish major at Pasadena City College. "It's a pretty tight novela and the girls are real hot."

Offering scripts and DVD copies of shows, "Bold" creators provide a tool to teachers who might otherwise transcribe Spanish-language telenovelas for students.

Eventually, CBS officials say, they hope to expand the program and possibly help teachers pull together curriculum.

"In any classroom you want something that is engaging, and in soap operas, you get caught up," said Theodore Young, head of Pasadena City College's foreign language department. "Students are using language not as an object to be studied but a tool to communicate."

Spanish teachers have long assigned telenovela watching for homework. Colleges even stock language labs with made-for-the-classroom telenovelas such as "Destinos," asking students to pay attention not only to language but also cultural cues - the cheek-kissing greetings and the class conflicts usually played out in a romance between a poor girl and rich boy.

And now producers at "The Bold and the Beautiful" are integrating Latino themes into a soap opera once reserved for the rich and mostly Anglo.

Veteran "Bold" writer and executive producer Bradley Bell speaks little Spanish, but admits he often flips on telenovelas for new ideas.

"We are trying to reach out to the Latino audience; it would be foolish not to," Bell said.

Since beginning the Spanish-language simulcasts five years ago, the soap opera hired a cast of off-screen actors who dub the on-screen actors' voices in Spanish.

To touch a wider Latino audience, producers also added Latino characters. Lorenzo Lamas and Mario Lopez now have regular spots playing brothers who come from humble roots.

On a recent afternoon in Professor Barbara Padron-Leon's conversational Spanish class at Pasadena City College, the soap opera enthralled students as Caitlin, a sexy model, confessed her amor to an older man whom her father would never accept.

"Que paso en este parte?" (What happened in this part?) Leon asked.

Hands shot up.

Some students stumbled over words to explain the affair. But nearly all got the cues, the embrace, the loving looks.

The response exactly what Padron-Leon envisioned when she decided to take on the class.

"They see something related to them that it makes (class) fun."

rachel.uranga(at)dailynews.com

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