Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

I don’t write much about international schools on this blog as it’s focused on U.S. K-12 schools. That said, there is a section for international schools on my list of Mandarin immersion schools here.

I heard from an old friend from San Francisco recently about a surprising shift in Hong Kong, though, and thought I would share.

Hong Kong International School (HKIS) is an American-style Pre-K – 12 school in Hong Kong that was founded in 1966. It was started by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and is still a school grounded in the Christian faith. Today it has over 3,000 students at two campuses, about 1,200 of whom are U.S. citizens.

And, interestingly for an American school on a Cantonese-speaking island, it’s adding a full Mandarin immersion program (which the school calls a dual language immersion program) next year. It will be available for those families who chose it for their incoming Reception 1 class, what in the U.S. we would call a Pre-Kindergarten class of four-year-olds. About 20% of the next incoming Reception 1 class will be in the immersion program.

(Asian schools tend to be big, Hong Kong International School has ten incoming classes for four-year-olds.)

The dual-language immersion program will launch in the fall of 2025. It’s being led by Kevin Chang, who spent many years at the oldest Mandarin immersion school in the United States (and possibly the world), the Chinese American International School in San Francisco.

HKIS has offered Mandarin as a subject for a long time, but adding an immersion track is new.

There are of course many internationally focused schools across Asia that are bilingual, offering an English-language education while also teaching Chinese. But true immersion, where at least half the academic day is taught in Chinese and half in English, is still rare though growing

While Hong Kong is still predominantly Cantonese speaking, Mandarin is increasingly important as it’s the official language of China, there so adding Mandarin rather than Cantonese immersion was “a natural and easy decision,” Chang said, especially since HKIS already has a full Mandarin language program, in which both simplified and traditional Chinese characters are offered. The immersion program will teach simplified Chinese characters, the ones used in China, rather than the traditional characters still in use in many parts of Hong Kong.