Global Village Academy in Northglenn returns to in-person learning The language immersion charter school began the school year remotely which was tough for many students. Byron Reed February 26, 2021 9News NORTHGLENN, Colo. — Global Village Academy (GVA) in Northglenn is a language immersion charter school that recently returned to in-person learning at the beginning…

By Julie Slama | j.slama@mycityjournals.com At Draper Elementary, a long-standing tradition has been gathering in the multipurpose room celebrating Chinese language and culture for Chinese New Year. This year, the school’s Chinese New Year celebration will look different. Each dual immersion classroom will still perform, but it will be recorded. Then, all the recordings will be…

Guy Emanuele Elementary School in Union City, California has launched a Mandarin immersion program. It began in the fall of 2020. The program will use simplified characters and begin at 80 of the school day in Mandarin, 20% in English. That will gradually decline to 50/50% by 5th grade. Launching fall of 2021. Union City…

The lovely folks at Imagin8 Press have come out with a raft of new books in easy-to-read Chinese. These include some very easy books like Twenty Three Cats (二十三只猫) which has only 100 characters in it. There’s also the story of Mulan, Woman Warrior in simplified Chinese using only a 240 word vocabulary. The books…

A fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal from January, for those who have subscriptions. Here’s the link. For those that don’t, some highlights: As the relationship between the U.S. and China has grown more tense, the number of U.S. students studying there had declined by one-fifth since a peak in 2011-2012. The number studying…

In general, Mandarin immersion programs do better when they’re in a whole school environment rather than a strand within a school. That said, the Woodstock Elementary Mandarin immersion program is one of the oldest and most popular in the country and families have been moving to the Portland neighborhood for decades to take part, so…

So what happens when immersion kids get to college? Here’s one pathway that’s worth knowing about. The Language Flagship is a public/private program that is an initiative of the National Security Education Program, whose mission is “to develop a pipeline of foreign language and culture expertise for the U.S. federal government workforce.” The focus has…