Avenues makes a big deal about being an immersion school, offering both Spanish and Mandarin immersion. However when I visited last year I did not get the impression that in Chinese, students got 50% of their academic instruction in Chinese, which is the definition of immersion.   Education Entrepreneur Chris Whittle Resigns From Avenues School…

Vancouver, British Columbia has just one Mandarin immersion school, despite the city being 17% Chinese-Canadian. And yes, I didn’t read carefully and initially conflated it with the much smaller (and non-Canadian) city of Vancouver, Wash., which also has one Mandarin immersion program–but no French immersion! Clearly Vancouver’s choice programs are very popular, as are neighborhood schools. It’s always…

This is from the Asia Society’s Chinese Language Matters newsletter, which is chock-full of useful information for teachers, administrators and parents of kids studying Chinese. I highly recommend signing up for it here; Simple Machine Flipping the Classroom Propels Learning Launching a flipped classroom demands creativity and initiative. The payoff is cumulative. (Flickr/rowanbank) By Heather Clydesdale…

February 24 2015, 6.10pm EST If you speak Mandarin, your brain is different AUTHOR Larry Taylor Senior lecturer, Department of Psychology at Northumbria University, Newcastle DISCLOSURE STATEMENT Larry Taylor does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant…

Not that it’s a bad thing by any means, but it could be that it’s not the total brain-workout we’ve thought.   Is Bilingualism Really an Advantage? The New Yorker By Maria Konnikova JANUARY 22, 2015 BY MARIA KONNIKOVA In 1922, in “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language mean…

I just updated my school list with Seashore Academy in Costa Mesa, Calif. That brings us up to 190 Mandarin immersion programs in the United States in 27 states and the District of Columbia. You can see the full list here.

Updated: 2015-02-25 11:46 By Cai Chunying and Hua Shengdun in Washington(China Daily USA) For Jule Byrd and Sean Hancock, second graders at Baltimore International Academy, Chinese New Year has added significance. Jule and Sean were among the more than 140 pupils who staged a two-hour long performance gala in Baltimore on Monday evening, singing Chinese…