You can see the website, with lots of great info for programs,here.
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council
Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education
-
-
-
Parents group asks Menlo Park district to let it start a Mandarin immersion charter school
Growing up, Carol Cunningham dreaded Sundays.
While her friends enjoyed their downtime, the daughter of immigrant parents was herded off to weekly Mandarin language classes. She resisted having to do the extra homework, tests and projects, and stopped attending the lessons at the beginning of high school. “I remember my mom telling me, ‘You’re going to regret not learning when you have the opportunity,’” she recalled.
It wasn’t until later that Cunningham, who now has two young sons, discovered the truth in her mother’s prediction. Although the Menlo Park resident can recognize characters and speak Mandarin without the trace of an accent, her vocabulary is frustratingly limited and she cannot read or write the language proficiently.
“I see my own kids and how effortless it is for them [to speak Mandarin],” Cunningham said. “I’m not forcing them. We’re not sitting down at the kitchen table and writing characters or practicing strokes or using flashcards. They speak as a native speaker would, and that’s just by me providing them with an immersive environment through conversation, what they listen to in the car and the TV they watch.”
Drawing on her personal experiences, Cunningham began to spearhead an effort about 1½ years ago to introduce a program in the Menlo Park City School District in which the core curriculum would be taught in the Mandarin language.
Please see more.
-
How a Public Chinese Immersion School Is Desegregating St. Louis
The Chinese School brings together students from the suburbs and the inner city in one of America’s most racially divided cities.
Lydia Chen, principal of the Chinese School, leads an assembly during the first day of the 2014-15 school year.(Reena Flores/National Journal)
September 9, 2014 National Journal recently visited St. Louis and Ferguson to see how Rust Belt cities are changing after losing more than half their populations. In the coming weeks, Next America will publish a series of stories about the people shaping the St. Louis region’s future.
St. Louis—”Zăo shàng hăo,” says principal Lydia Chen in Mandarin Chinese to about 160 children sitting in neat rows on the playground. “Good morning.”
“Zăo shàng hăo,” reply the first- and second-graders, wearing navy ties and sweater vests, and fidgeting in line next their teachers, who are mostly from Beijing and Taiwan.
It’s the first day of the year at the Chinese School, a St. Louis public charter school that teaches kindergarten through second grade entirely in Mandarin Chinese. Most of the students at this inner-city school come from low-income families. More than half of them are African-American.
The school is one of a handful of charter schools trying to reverse decades of racial segregation in the St. Louis public-school system. And enrollment is growing. This is the Chinese School’s third year open and it just moved into a building of its own, a converted brick hospital just a mile from the Anheuser Busch brewery in downtown St. Louis.
Please read more here.
-
The Science of Smart
Click here to hear the radio piece by American Radio Works. Be aware that it’s an hour-long documentary!
August 2014
Researchers have long been searching for better ways to learn. In recent decades, experts working in cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience have opened new windows into how the brain works, and how we can learn to learn better.
In this program, we look at some of the big ideas coming out of brain science. We meet the researchers who are unlocking the secrets of how the brain acquires and holds on to knowledge. And we introduce listeners to the teachers and students who are trying to apply that knowledge in the real world.
Please see more here.
-
CREDIT: LILLIAN MONGEAU/EDSOURCE
Second graders Jayden Lew and Giselle Ortega work on their Spanish grammar at Edison Elementary School in Glendale, where they are enrolled in a dual language immersion program.
Bilingual education could make a comeback
July 29, 2014 | By Lillian Mongeau | 45 Comments
After nearly two decades, bilingual education in California could stage a resurgence if the state Senate approves a bill in August that would put the issue on the ballot in November 2016.
Since the passage of Proposition 227 in 1998, schools have been banned from offering classes taught in a language other than English without express permission from parents, among other requirements. The initiative, which passed with 61 percent of the vote, overhauled a system where the default assignment for English learners was a class taught in their native language.
“We were outspent on advertising 24 to 1 and we still won one of the largest landslides in California political history,” said Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley businessman who sponsored the ballot initiative.
Bilingual education, as it was practiced in California prior to the passage of Prop. 227, provided instruction to non-English speakers in their primary language in some or all academic subjects. Bilingual students also took classes specifically aimed at teaching them English. The goal, as they progressed, was for more and more of each class to be taught in English.
Though many felt as Unz did about bilingual education,
Prop.227 remains controversial among educators. Many point to studies showing that high-quality bilingual education can help English-learner students transition to English-language classes. But even many educators believe the old bilingual system was flawed. English learners make up nearly a quarter of California’s public schoolchildren and, under the old system, they could remain in Spanish or other language classes for years without becoming fluent in English. And quality varied immensely from classroom to classroom, said Elena Fajardo, the administrator of the Language Policy and Leadership Office at the California Department of Education.“Based on my experience, the quality of the instructor, the quality of the instruction, the program design and the adherence to that design is really where the benefits lie,” Fajardo said.
Please read more here.
-
The book’s done but not yet published. (It also turned out to be 460 pages long, so you’re going to get your money’s worth!)
My wonderful designer here in San Francisco, Craig Johnson, has created a beautiful manuscript for the print-on-demand version that will be available through Amazon CreateSpace. We need to do one more pass just to make sure no stray layout errors have crept in as it made its way from a Word document to InDesign to PDF to Amazon. I’m hoping within two weeks it will be available for order as a printed book from Amazon.
Believe me, as SOON as that moment comes, I’ll post.
The e-book version is turning out to be quite a bit more problematic.
Amazon says it does not support Chinese as a language and that therefore “At this time, we cannot guarantee that it will not be unpublished,” with the “it” being A Parent’s Guide to Mandarin Immersion.
Amazon only supports European languages. You can find a full list of them here. Chinese is not one of them.
For over a month now I’ve been trying to find out whether a book which contains Chinese characters will work as an Amazon e-book.
The book is written in English, but it contains many examples in Chinese. Here’s one from chapter 4: How Immersion Works:
When our younger daughter was in third grade we spent a week or so in the spring going through a packet of math questions for the standardized test all public school students in our state take each year. The test, and practice questions, were in English. She’d been studying math since kindergarten but it had all been in Mandarin.
One of the questions was, “Which of these shapes is a pentagon?” Below were drawings of three different shapes.
“That one’s a sānjiǎoxíng, that one’s a liùbiānxíng and that’s a wǔjiǎoxíng,” she said, pointing to the triangle, the hexagon and the pentagon. She knew the geometric forms and could easily have passed the test—except the test was in English.
What she didn’t know was the English word for五角形, or wǔjiǎoxíng.
Thankfully, that was easily fixed. I asked her what wǔjiǎo meant and she correctly said it meant “five sides.” Xíng, she told me, meant “shape.”
All I had to do was tell her that “penta” meant five. Then I asked her which shape was a pentagon. “五角形! That’s a pentagon,” she told me.
My concern is that if the Chinese characters don’t show up, the book will be a lot less useful for parents. As we’ve all experienced, sometimes computer programs that don’t support characters will show them as black rectangles or question marks rather than the actual character. Clearly,that’s not going to work for this book.
So I’ve been emailing with Amazon and the news is confused.
In an email I received Friday from the help desk at Kindle Direct Publishing, I was told this;
Since Chinese is one of our unsupported languages at this time we don’t handle information on at which version people are being able to see the Chinese. Also we can’t actually encourage our publisher to use an unsupported language, because once the book is in review for our quality team they will look at it and will advertise to you this is not a language we support, and most likely will ask you to unpublish.
However, if for example you still want to use it and publish in this language, we can not be responsible of how the book is going to show up on the different devices, and can not guarantee a good customer and reading experience .This could mean that when I upload the manuscript file to Amazon, the system will kick it back as “unpublishable” because it contains Chinese. It could also mean it will go through just fine. I’ll keep you apprised.
The print option will still be there, so the book’s coming out no matter what. But e-books make up 30% of the U.S. publishing market at this point so clearly there are lots of readers for whom that is the preferred form.
Interestingly, I’ve purchased several Kindle e-books from Amazon which contain Chinese and the characters were perfect. In fact last week as a test I bought a copy of a bilingual kid’s book called Lisa can read by Sujatha Lalgudi which is in Chinese and English. It came through just fine.
At this point I think my best bet will be to publish the book on Amazon as an e-book but include a lot of caveats that some versions of Kindle may not support Chinese characters. I’ll try to keep a constantly updated list of which ones work, so that people who want to buy it will know if they should go for the printed edition or the electronic one, depending on which e-reader they use.
The cover above is the most recent draft, there are a few typos which will be fixed in the final, but I wanted to give you a taste of what’s to come.
And because people keep telling me I need a pronouncer to go with it, here are two: Weise rhymes with geese and Chenery is CHEN-ah-ree.
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council 