A Cantonese immersion graduate reflects on her experiences

In response to questions parents had been asking about whether immersion students find that their English is neglected, I asked parents what their experiences had been on the San Francisco Advocates For Multilingual Excellence (which is all immersion programs in the San Francisco Unified School District.)

An incoming Mandarin immersion parent sent the question to a younger relative, Wei-ying Wang, who went through the Cantonese immersion program at West Portal Elementary school in San Francisco.

What came back was a beautiful, insightful essay about Chinese immersion. While her experience is different from Mandarin immersion in that she had first Cantonese and then Mandarin (though I expect it will be of great interest to families at the Chinese Immersion School at DeAvila,) it offers interesting insight into what our kids might experience. And if her off-the-cuff email to a family member is any indication, English fluency is clearly not a problem for kids in immersion.

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By Wei-ying Wang

I don’t feel that my English was neglected in any way whatsoever while going through the immersion programs at West Portal Elementary School and Hoover Middle school. My conversational Chinese was pretty good before starting kindergarten (probably due to going to preschool at the YWCA in Chinatown), probably to the point that my English was not as fluent. I’m not sure how much the programs have changed since I attended, but during my time at West Portal, while I didn’t feel any lack in English.

Looking back years later, I noticed that it was somewhat more difficult to make friends outside of the program, since classes were different and didn’t intermingle much. The only other problem I can think of in elementary school was that the after school daycare program at West Portal didn’t have a staff member who could assist with questions about homework in Chinese. Children with parents who can read/write/speak Chinese definitely had an edge when it came to homework assignments. The program was great because it wasn’t just learning language, but also aspects of Chinese culture.

There was a slight disconnect between transitioning from West Portal to Hoover Middle School. Where math was taught in Chinese and social studies in English at West Portal, the Hoover program reversed this. Hoover’s program was not as immersive as West Portal’s. There was definitely a significant decrease in the time spent speaking Chinese in the classroom (however, this solved West Portal’s problem of socializing with people outside of the program). I thought Hoover’s program was equally valuable, although I will say learning about US history in Chinese was quite difficult. I’m not sure if it was my imagination or not, since it was so long ago, but it felt like I was in class longer than other students (since we had an early morning class). The classes were good though, and I remember we even had weekly assignments that required us to read and summarize articles in Chinese newspapers.

Lowell High School’s Chinese program is completely different, primarily because it was Mandarin instead of Cantonese, and because it was only a language class (versus a couple of subjects that were taught in Chinese). So there definitely no problem with neglected English in this case since Chinese was only 40 minutes a day. This was also where I had my first introduction to simplified Chinese characters. The difficulty here wasn’t picking up Mandarin, or even learning the simplified writing, but that my Chinese reading comprehension was much more advanced than that of my classmates. This made things awkward, since I could clearly understand the things I was reading, but couldn’t read them aloud very accurately.

This led to the reading material being somewhat elementary for me. I would say that the majority of the students in the Chinese classes at Lowell knew conversational Chinese, but had had no previous experience with reading and writing in Chinese. The style of teaching and curriculum of the classes were also very different from the immersion programs in that these classes fulfilled a language requirement, and were therefore very focused on teaching a very straightforward and not necessarily interesting material (which made the pace of the class seem a little slow despite how frequently we were meeting). The funny thing was that they actually had a section of the class devoted to food, so students were taught things like how to say “honey walnut shrimp.” Which didn’t seem too useful for ordering in many SF restaurants where Cantonese is the standard.

I would note that high schools and most colleges and universities only offer Mandarin classes. However, I think students who went through the West Portal, Hoover and Alice Fong Yu (a K-8 Cantonese immersion public school) immersion programs are at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to this, if they opt to continue taking Mandarin past middle school. The problem which I faced (not so much in high school but once I hit college) is that I had extremely advanced reading comprehension and extremely poor verbal fluency in Mandarin.

Particularly in college, where the reverse was usually true for the students taking Chinese (they could speak, but couldn’t read or write). This put me in an extremely awkward position when I started at Wellesley College’s Chinese department. In the first week of classes, I tried out 3 different levels of courses because the professors didn’t know what to do with me. The first class was introductory 100-level class, and completely boring since it was so easy. The second class was a slightly more advanced beginner’s class, where once again the course materials were too easy, but I couldn’t understand the instructor’s Mandarin (the department head thought it might have to do with my ability to understand the instructor’s accent). Finally, they settled me in an advanced conversational Mandarin class (which was a 300-level class). Again, I would say the course materials and assignments weren’t particularly difficult, but I had great difficulty with the speaking portion of the class.

I think that Chinese immersion programs are extremely valuable from an educational standpoint. For children of native speakers, the programs provide a connection to their heritage and culture, which would otherwise be greatly reduced going through the traditional track. If the children already speak the language, the programs offer a space to improve and maintain their fluency (which they would definitely lose spending the entire school day speaking in English). I think the programs are designed with the understanding that they shouldn’t impact English comprehension detrimentally.

I don’t think I missed anything from learning multiplication and division or the Articles of the Confederation in Chinese instead of English. If anything, I probably learned more, since I could talk about the things I learned at school in both Chinese and English. The immersion program makes speaking Chinese in class the norm, it doesn’t seem strange or foreign when everyone around you is experiencing the same thing.

I would also add that going through an immersion program didn’t make it seem like I was doing a lot more work than regular students, even though, to some degree, I was. This is probably the advantage of an immersion program over after school Chinese classes (which I’ve heard from many people aren’t too useful since you end up resenting having to go to another class after everyone else gets off from school).

All in all, even though I don’t think my Chinese is as good as it was several years ago due to lack of usage, I still value the experience and the education I received from these programs and support the continuation and expansion of bilingual immersion programs.

As for how useful it is in everyday life, I didn’t keep in touch with many people from the immersion programs, so I’m not entirely sure if they used the Chinese they learned later on in life. The only person I’ve seen recently gave a eulogy in Chinese for her late grandfather, and she noted that going through the immersion program allowed her to be the only one in the family able to communicate with her grandfather in his native language.

As for myself, I haven’t used my Chinese much beyond listening to pop music 🙂 When I was living in Boston though, I had many elderly Chinese people asking me for directions on the trains, so I’m sure they appreciated my Cantonese. If I had continued on the career path I had originally intended in college (art historian in contemporary Chinese art), I think I would have used the Mandarin a lot. I did notice that of the students taking Mandarin in College, quite a few of them did so with the intention of using it in their future finance careers.