Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education
Naselle board votes to keep Mandarin
Unanimous vote keeps program
Wednesday, March 26, 2014 8:53 am
By NICK NIKKILA
NASELLE — The Naselle School Board unanimously voted March 18 to continue the district’s Mandarin Immersion Program, eliciting an eruption of applause from the audience.
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The school’s teachers.
Information about the program here.
(lifesizeimages/istockphoto)By Heather Clydesdale
Teachers today face a conundrum: they lack the hours needed to help students master requisite proficiencies. This burden is amplified for those teaching language immersion classes. Some split their students’ school day with an English teacher, and most must use additional time to explain concepts and build skills in a language that is not students’ mother tongue. Some experts, however, are proving that math and language immersion can be a formula for efficiency in learning both subjects. Asia Society spoke with educators from Utah and educators from Minnesota shared their strategies for combining these two subject areas.
Sandra Talbot, project director for the Utah Chinese Dual-Immersion Elementary Programs, says that the ambitious scope of Utah’s immersion initiative, launched four years ago, prompted state administrators to seek creative ways to combine math and language.
First, they sought a curriculum flexible enough to suit the different programs of ten districts, ultimately selecting the enVisionMATH Common Core product by Pearson because it was topic-driven. “If there was a school district that was using GO Math or Math Expressions,” says Talbot, “we could use a Chinese enVisionMATH topic that the teachers would be able to align successfully with the math topic that was being taught by the other grade-level classrooms.” EnVisionMATH textbooks are also available in Chinese for first through fourth grades, with versions for higher grades expected in the near future. Since Utah uses a fifty-fifty immersion model, where the day is split between two separate teachers giving English or Chinese instruction, a dual-language curriculum makes it easy for educators to coordinate their efforts.
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When all the big changes came to Heber City, Utah, few people experienced them as keenly as Eric Campbell, the principal of a local elementary school, father of four boys and pillar of his local church. Campbell and his wife Melissa had been one of the thousands of new families who’d settled here over the last couple of decades, transforming this picturesque former farming community into a suburb. The population rate had long been creeping up in Heber City.
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From Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Patch
One asks that Mandarin immersion be reconsidered for incoming kindergarteners, the other that the board remove the magnet option for Cherokee School.
The fate of the District 67 Mandarin immersion program and the possibility of a magnet program for world language immersion has led to two dueling online petitions for Lake Forest parents.
One, titled, “Demand District 67 to Reconsider Kindergarten Mandarin Immersion for 2014-15” had 592 supporters as of Tuesday evening. It’s asking the school board to reconsider its decision to eliminate the Mandarin immersion option for incoming kindergarteners.
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By Lelan Miller 孟乐岚
One of the many challenges of being a Chinese immersion teacher is finding opportunities to observe others teaching immersion Chinese. Observations are an integral and important part of student teaching in any field and especially more so in the relatively new field of Chinese immersion teaching. Many teaching strategies and methods to teach Chinese in immersion education are different from those used in non-immersion settings; therefore it is extremely important for the immersion educator to see successful examples of language lessons for that particular instructional setting.
Observing experienced and trained model teachers of immersion Chinese should not be limited only to the student teaching phase. Neither should observation opportunities be limited solely to the site administrators. Opportunities to observe should be provided and encouraged many times throughout the teacher’s career, whether the observing teacher is a novice or an experienced educator. Immersion school program administrators should also avail themselves of opportunities to observe lessons along with their program teachers so as to enhance discussions and teacher development upon return to the home campus.
Because immersion programs are scattered throughout the US, observations in live settings in real time are not always possible due to the cost and time constraints involved in traveling to a model immersion site. Thereupon this task often falls to the administrator of the immersion program to do the traveling and observing of pedagogical methods in the site to be visited.
Videotaped demonstration lessons are an appropriate means of delivering lessons to the observer. They can be observed anytime and anywhere thereby reducing the amount of instructional time lost due to the requirement of traveling to a distant site.
The Utah Dual Language Immersion has several teaching demonstrations on video available on their website under the Startalk 2013 tab at http://utahchineseimmersion.org/startalk/startalk-2013/
There is a particularly good demonstration lesson within the Utah Dual Language Immersion site at http://www.bizvision.com/webcast/prod/43357?group_stream_idx=2904
Whether to continue the program as is, create a world language program at all three kindergarten to fourth-grade elementary schools, or designate one as a magnet immersion language school is a decision that will be made in the next two months. The decision will take affect in the 2015-16 academic year.
District administrators currently are meeting with teachers and parents at each elementary school before spring break, the reconvened Language Acquisition and School Integration Committee and the Association of Parents and Teachers to assess how they feel about the options on the table. The administrative team, lead by Superintendent Mike Simeck, met with current Mandarin Immersion parents last week.
Parents in that nearly three-hour session made it clear they love the program and want it to stay as is, even bringing back immersion for incoming kindergarteners. The Board voted unanimously in February to discontinue Mandarin Immersion for the incoming kindergarten class in the 2014-15 academic year, citing declining kindergarten enrollment and a division the program, though admittedly popular and successful, has made among Mandarin and non-Mandarin students at Cherokee School, where the district immersion program is offered.
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Mandarin Immersion Parents Council 