Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

The second Chinese Language Conference was held in San Francisco March 14 – 16, 2008. Its theme was “Advancing the K-12 pipeline” and it focused on K-12 students Mandarin, both in immersion and more traditional classes.

The conference was held by the CAIS (Chinese American International School) Institute, which was created to support Chinese studies at the preschool through high school level.

Attendees visited Mandarin programs at several San Francisco schools including:

– Jose Ortega Elementary School (public)

– Starr King Elementary School (public)

– Chinese American International School (private)

– International High School (private)

– Lowell (public)

All five of the Mandarin teachers at Jose Ortega and Starr King were invited to attend the conference. Because there were so many visitors from other programs visiting our schools, the conference organizers also gave two passes for parents. Attending for Starr King was Beth, for Jose Ortega it was Kellyn.

We put together our notes and Beth wrote them up to share with parents. It’s somewhat jumbled but should give some sense of what the conference was about.

Do you want Mandarin with that?

As if we didn’t already know it, Mandarin’s booming. The conference, held at the Chinatown Hilton, was full of teachers and administrators from across the U.S. who either already have Chinese programs underway or are looking to create them. There were also vendors selling books, teaching materials, computer programs and gadgets such as a pen that can read characters and translate them into pinyin, which would come in handy for helping with homework if it didn’t cost $300.

Most of the workshops had a pretty heavy-duty pedagogical bent, with titles like “Constructivism and the role of the Chinese teaching specialist in a Bilingual Chinese/English classroom” and “Chinese curriculum framework design based on backward design model.”

Another big topic was Where will the Mandarin teachers come from for all these new Mandarin programs popping up across the country? I spoke to a principal from Wisconsin who wanted to hire at least two teachers and who said he was having a terrible finding anyone who would move to his state, much less be the only Chinese teacher at a school.

Thankfully, we’re lucky in San Francisco that our city is well-liked by Chinese speakers, there’s a strong community for them to join and they’re not alone at their schools (or at least Jose Ortega’s teacher won’t be alone for long.)

Carol Lei, the Mandarin Immersion coordinator with the San Francisco Mayor’s office presented a workshop on our programs titled “Building a collaborative program” which was well attended. It discussed the issues faced in creating our Mandarin immersion programs.

Why “articulation” is important

One word you’ll hear in discussions about language immersion programs in general is “articulation.” In this instance, it means creating seamless and smooth transitions between grade levels.

A frequent problem in language programs is that when a child moves from one school to another, say grade school to middle school, what’s being taught is different enough from what they learned before that the transition is bumpy. The vocabulary or skill levels might be very different.

Several workshops at the conference addressed articulation. One of the programs that seems to have dealt with this well is Portland, Oregon, which has the oldest public Mandarin immersion school in the country.

Woodside Elementary School started with a blended kindergarten/first grade class in 1998 and now has 200 students. The middle school component at Hosford Middle School was launched five years later and the high school program, at Portland’s Cleveland High School, will being next year.

To read comments about the program from a graduate, a parent and the principal, please go to the Asia Society newsletter at http://askasia.org/chinese/announcements/newsletter0707.htm

So far the integration of the elementary and middle schools has been seamless, said Portland teachers. “When K-5 ends, they just pick up where they left off and keep going.”

Of course it’s a special situation because the kids going into Middle school all come from the same school.

Here in San Francisco, our five teachers meet monthly to discuss what they’re teaching and how, to insure that all our students are moving forward together.

College level articulation

So what happens when our kids go to college, after 12 years of Mandarin immersion? Up until recently, there’s simply wouldn’t have been much there for them. A typical college Chinese program would have offered at best a years worth of classes and then they were out of luck.

No more. Today, the Defense Dept. is funding what are called Language Flagship programs in several languages deemed “critical” to national defense. They include Arabic, Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, Korean, Persian/Farsi, Russian and central Asian languages.

For Mandarin speakers, that means there are now Flagship programs at

Arizona State University

Oregon State University

Brigham Young University

Ohio State University

University of Mississippi

So instead of taking one class in newspaper Chinese and possibly one in Classical Chinese and then exhausting the course options, incoming students with a high degree of Mandarin proficiency get to take actual course work in Chinese. These programs allow college students to not only do a major but also achieve professional-level proficiency in that field in Chinese. There are exchange programs in place so that American students can pursue higher-level course work at premier Chinese universities in fields as diverse as architecture, physics, business, economics and history.

You can read about the programs here: http://www.thelanguageflagship.org/chinese.html

Diversity:

This workshop looked at diversity issues in Chinese programs. Interestingly, the biggest issue for most schools was bringing non-Chinese children into the schools. Of course at Starr King and Jose Ortega, our quest is to bring more Chinese families to the school, because we’re supposed to be two-way immersion programs. That means that half the children in our programs should speak Mandarin at home. But thus far the number of Mandarin speaking students has been much lower than 50%, though it will increase in the 2008-2009 school year.

At the workshop, I asked the gathered veteran teachers and administrators at other schools: Why did they think that so far few Mandarin-speaking families (specifically relatively new immigrant families) have signed up for Mandarin Immersion in at Starr King and Jose Ortega?

Their thoughts were that often Chinese parents prize reputation, stability and prestige in a school. Both Starr King and Jose Ortega are new programs, so we haven’t had time to build these up. The good news is that as our programs mature, everyone seemed to think that we’d be more appealing.

The other main point they made is that newly-arrived families see English as the most important skill their children can acquire, reasoning that they can learn Chinese at home.

Once our programs because established and known as the high quality schools they already are, the consensus seemed to be that the Chinese families would be more inclined to apply.