Lake Forest, Illinois offers a cautionary tale of the unintended consequences that can spring from Mandarin immersion. Lake Forest is a small, affluent and attractive suburb about five miles north of Chicago. It’s a town with great schools. So great that every year Chicago families with young children nearing kindergarten age pack up and move…

Summer Camps for Mandarin Chinese Learning: Summer 2014 By Lelan Miller 孟樂嵐 Spring vacation is coming up soon, meaning now is the time to start planning and applying to summer camps specific to Chinese language learning. This is also a good time to keep an eye on the Startalk site which will soon be posting…

Pearson Singapore Pearson is a large international producer of educational materials. Their Singapore office has created multiple iPad Mandarin books. They can be read simply as books, they can read the story aloud in Mandarin or the reader can touch individuals phrases to hear how they’re pronounced. There are over 50 titles available, each at…

CLEF 2014: A Single Themed Symposium Fit Your Chinese Language Programs to the Common Core State Standards In order to better serve the community,  the organizing committee of Chinese Language Education Forum (CLEF) has decided to re-shape this annual event. From this year on, CLEF will be held in the Spring rather than at the end of…

From our friends at the Asia Society’s Chinese Language Initiative   by Chris Livaccari How many Americans have studied four or five years of French or Spanish in school and yet can barely manage a sentence of that language once we hit adulthood? Why do Americans continue to be ridiculed and sneered at by people…

This is the district where Mandarin immersion has been  popular among parents, enough that half of the students in Cherokee Elementary are in the program. However  parents who did not chose the program  called it elitist and unfair. Clearly they won the day. The district announced on Feb. 27th that there will be no incoming…

Language Immersion Schools picked for project to diversify leadership Photograph by Bill Zurheide Local charter joins ‘Network Accelerator’   Kindergarten students interact at the St. Louis Language Immersion Schools’ Spanish School. Posted: Thursday, February 27, 2014 12:05 am By American staff Saint Louis Language Immersion Schools has been selected for the inaugural cohort for the Charter…