Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education

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  • A more nuanced take on Zuckerberg’s Chinese

    Mark Zuckerberg Speaking Chinese: Brave, Foolish, or Both?

    你什么意思？What are you trying to say?
    NOV 1 2014, 1:36 PM ET

    Portraits of Mark Zuckerberg by Chinese artist Zhu Jia, at gallery in Singapore last year (Reuters)

    About ten days ago Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a video of himself giving a speech and handling a Q&A with students at Tsinghua University in Beijing — and doing it in Chinese. You’ve probably seen it already, but here it is again just in case.

    A few hours later, Isaac Stone Fish of FP posted an item with his answer to the question that most Westerners who’ve been in China had been asked by their friends. Namely, How did Zuckerberg sound? And his answer was harsh.
    Please read more here.

  • Why is bilingual education ‘good’ for rich kids but ‘bad’ for poor, immigrant students?

    Answer Sheet

    Why is bilingual education ‘good’ for rich kids but ‘bad’ for poor, immigrant students?

    world

    If you follow the public debate about bilingual education, you know that there are two basic opposing views. As Claire Bowern, the author of the following post, writes,

    To put it bluntly, bilingualism is often seen as “good” when it’s rich English speakers adding a language as a hobby or another international language, but “bad when it involves poor, minority, or indigenous groups adding English to their first language, even when the same two languages are involved.

    Here is a piece about the value of bilingualism for all students. Bowern is an associate professor of linguistics at Yale University and a fellow in The OpEd Project’s Public Voices project who has been researching topics s related to language and society, including bilingualism, for 15 years. She also works as an advisor to Native American and Australian indigenous groups on language reclamation, maintenance, and bilingual education issues.

    Please read more here.

  • The New York Times on Yinghua Academy in Minneapolis

    An American School Immerses Itself in All Things Chinese

    By JANE A. PETERSONOCT. 26, 2014

    Students drawing examples of Mandarin words for geographical terms is a social studies class at Yinghua Academy.Jane Peterson 

    MINNEAPOLIS — On weekday mornings, a stream of orange buses and private cars from 75 Minnesota postal codes wrap around Yinghua Academy, the first publicly funded Chinese-immersion charter school in the United States, in the middle-class neighborhood of Northeast Minneapolis. Most pupils, from kindergarten to eighth grade, dash to bright-colored classrooms for the 8:45 a.m. bell, eager to begin “morning meeting,” a freewheeling conversation in colloquial Mandarin.

    Meanwhile, two grades form five perfect lines in the gym for calisthenics, Chinese style. Dressed neatly in the school’s blue uniforms, the students enthusiastically count each move — “liu, qi, ba, jiu, shi.”

    By 9:15, a calm sense of order pervades the school as formal instruction begins for math, reading, social studies, history and science. Instructors teach in Mandarin, often asking questions that prompt a flurry of raised hands. No one seems to speak out of turn. “We bring together both East and West traditions,” explains the academic director, Luyi Lien, who tries to balance Eastern discipline with Western fun.

    Please read more here.

  • Chinese millionaire launches boarding school in Los Angeles

    With that many Chinese students, you’d think they’d add immersion for the English speakers.

     

    New downtown L.A. boarding school aims to enhance culture, education

    By FRANK SHYONGcontact the reporter
    EducationColleges and UniversitiesLos Angeles HotelsDining and DrinkingLifestyle and LeisureChinaIslamic State
    New downtown L.A. boarding school adds to local cultural and educational options for foreigners and Americans
    American University Preparatory School at L.A. Hotel Downtown is brainchild of Chinese billionaire Wei Huang

    The elevator doors slide open on the 11th Floor, and Annie Chau, 14, walks down a plush carpeted hallway, a backpack slung over her shoulder.

    She pushes open a door to reveal a lushly appointed dining room with a sweeping view of the downtown Los Angeles skyline. A catered lunch has been laid out — gyros, saffron rice and pita bread with more than a dozen fixings. She joins a group of teenagers gathered around an iPad at a polished granite table.

    It’s lunchtime at the American University Preparatory School, a new private boarding school that occupies two floors of a luxury downtown hotel off Figueroa and Third streets.

    The school is the brainchild of Chinese billionaire Wei Huang, who made his fortune in real estate.

    California has seen a wave of Chinese investment in the last few years — more than $1.3 billion between 2000 and 2011 alone, according to a report by Rhodium Group, a New York consulting firm that studies global economic trends. Immigrant wealth has built hotels, shopping centers and mansions across the suburbs of the San Gabriel Valley.

    Please read more here.

     

     

  • Wow, Houston’s Mandarin immersion school’s new building is just wow…

    A look inside one of the coolest schools on the drawing board for Houston

    Oct 22, 2014, 6:00am CDT
    The new Chinese Mandarin Language Immersion Magnet School will feature an open concept, LED lighting and ample natural light.

    View Photos

    The new Chinese Mandarin Language Immersion Magnet School will feature an open concept, LED lighting and ample natural light.

    Reporter- Houston Business Journal
    Email  |  Twitter

    Gone are the days of boxy classrooms flooded with fluorescent lights.

    New designs on the drawing board for proposed schools in the Houston area — and there are a lot of them thanks toupcoming bond referendums — are innovative and engaging. But plans for the new Chinese Mandarin Language Immersion Magnet School, slated for an 8-acre parcel on West Alabama Street in the Galleria area, look like nothing you’ve seen before.

    Please read more here.

  • Mark Zuckerberg speaks Chinese. Really, he does.

    You can get your kids to translate, but basically he’s saying that his wife is Chinese and her grandmother only speaks Chinese, and now he’s learned. His accent is horrible but his Chinese is actually pretty good.
    Screen Shot 2014-10-22 at 3.43.29 PM

    Click the “post” link below to see the full interview:

    Post by Mark Zuckerberg.

  • The Economist: Being bilingual makes you mentally fit

    Variety makes you (mentally) fit

    FOR years, researchers in bilingualism have been touting striking findings about how bilingualism affects the brain. Two of the most memorable involve “executive control” and delayed dementia. With the first, bilinguals have shown that they are better able to focus on demanding mental tasks despite distractions. In other studies, it has been estimated that bilinguals see the onset of dementia, on average, about five years later than monolinguals do.

    This week comes new evidence* for the pile: researchers led by Roberto Filippi of Anglia Ruskin University have found that young bilingual pupils did a better job answering tricky questions with a noisy voice in the background than a monolingual control group did. The study was small (just 40 pupils, only 20 in each group). But its robustness is helped by the diversity of the bilinguals, who spoke Italian, Spanish, Bengali, Polish, Russian and others in addition to English. The experimenters tried to distract the pupils with random unrelated recordings in English (which all the pupils spoke) and Greek (which none of them did). The bilinguals did significantly better at ignoring the Greek distraction. (They did just a bit better with the English one.)

    Please read more here.