Summer Camps for Mandarin Chinese Learning: Summer 2014

By Lelan Miller 孟樂嵐

Spring vacation is coming up soon, meaning now is the time to start planning and applying to summer camps specific to Chinese language learning. This is also a good time to keep an eye on the Startalk site which will soon be posting site selections for summer 2014. The site in Utah is already taking applications:

http://ce.byu.edu/cw/startalkChinese/

 

The Mandarin Learning Center in Taipei is now taking applications for the 2014 International Summer Mandarin Language Camp for ages 7-15 with two sessions being offered this July and August:

http://mlc.sce.pccu.edu.tw/summer-camp/

The National Taipei University of Education has announced their 2014 Mandarin Summer Camp for ages 6-15 with two four-week sessions to be slated between this June and August:

http://www.taiwanembassy.org/public/Data/312423553071.pdf

 

National Taiwan Normal University is organizing Mandarin language learning camp for ages 8-15 on its campus for summer 2014:

http://chinese.mtc.ntnu.edu.tw:8080/summercamp/en/index01.html

This is by no means an

Pearson Singapore

Pearson is a large international producer of educational materials. Their Singapore office has created multiple iPad Mandarin books. They can be read simply as books, they can read the story aloud in Mandarin or the reader can touch individuals phrases to hear how they’re pronounced. There are over 50 titles available, each at $5.99. They range from relatively simple to stories appropriate for students in fourth grade and beyond.

5QChannel.com

A stellar site out of Taiwan that has apps and stories online, in both simplified and traditional characters. Kids love it and they have nice animation. Definitely worth signing up for. They have a very high fee, $140 per year, which is really aimed at schools. They offer a lower priced alternative, usually $30, for parents in the United States. Email them to ask for more information about their US pricing. jr@5qchannel.com. Highly recommended.

ChildRoad

http://www.childroad.com

This is a digital library of over 1,000 books read aloud in Mandarin. Children can see the story and hear it read to them. There are stories for kids age 4-12, including fairy tales, idiom and famous novels, all narrated by professional Chinese narrators who include TV and radio hosts. Idiom or proverb stories are the stories behind traditional Chinese idiomatic sayings, often called Four Character Stories. They’re used a lot in everyday speech, kind of like “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” only much more literary. You have to know the story to get the meaning.

eGlobalReader

http://www.eglobalreader.com

This site offers books in Chinese that can toggle between characters, pinyin and English. They only had eight books in 2014 but plan to expand.

Children’s Cultural Center

This is a website by the Taiwanese Ministry of Culture that features fun Chinese videos and information for kids. It’s kind of like PBS for kids in Chinese. It’s all in traditional Chinese but you can click around and see what you find. And there are no worries about stumbling upon something inappropriate. Most of the stories have the Bopomofo transliteration system next to the characters, that’s what the squiggles are that your child probably won’t know. But it doesn’t matter, the stories are fun to watch.

http://children.moc.gov.tw

From our friends at the Asia Society’s Chinese Language Initiative

 

by Chris Livaccari

How many Americans have studied four or five years of French or Spanish in school and yet can barely manage a sentence of that language once we hit adulthood? Why do Americans continue to be ridiculed and sneered at by people around the world for our lack of linguistic prowess?

Many educators with a global outlook are wrestling daily with these legacies of American exceptionalism. The reality, of course, is that many Americans are multilingual. Indeed, many of the best foreign speakers of Chinese and Japanese I have ever met are Americans. I think the problem is one of being a nation of extremes—a country in which you’d expect to find the very best language learners and the very worst, just as you’ll find, for example, the most obese people and the most health-obsessed.

The major challenge is lack of incentives. Why do people in Iceland speak such beautiful English? The answer is simple: you wouldn’t get very far in life speaking only a language understood by less than half a million people on a single island north of Europe. While there is currently an explosion of interest in Chinese language learning among Americans, the fact is that the vast majority of international business conducted in China—and globally—is conducted in English. So what’s the incentive for any American kid to learn another language?

Please read more here.

This is the district where Mandarin immersion has been  popular among parents, enough that half of the students in Cherokee Elementary are in the program. However  parents who did not chose the program  called it elitist and unfair.

Clearly they won the day. The district announced on Feb. 27th that there will be no incoming kindergarten Mandarin immersion class at Cherokee Elementary School. Instead all students will get the traditional kindergarten program in English.

The district hopes to “improve the program and look at the best immersion and language instruction options for our community and then reopen registration in 2015-2016,” according to the post below.

Students already in the immersion program will be allowed to continue through the end of fifth grade. What the district will offer them at that point is unclear.

You can read more about the decision here.

The level of vitriol in this district around immersion has been remarkable.

Here’s one example:

“Laura questions, does integrating the immersion program with children not in the immersion program meet these needs? Laura has personally observed her own children become victims to an inferior educational experience where their needs are not being met due to the overwhelming demands of the Mandarin Program at Cherokee. Instead, it seems that the children are being divided by the program. An elitist milieu has been created, an us versus them mentality. The school should feel united and school proud. This program is breeding contempt and a sense of inequality, worse yet the children’s basic needs are failing to be met.”

You can read more of this perspective here.

My feeling has always been that no district should force students to enter into an immersion program. But allowing families to chose it hardly seems elitist. Not everyone wants immersion. Is wanting it then elitist in and of itself?

In Lake Forest, Illinois it appears to be.

Language Immersion Schools picked for project to diversify leadership

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The Mandarin Matrix is a set of Chinese readers previously published as Primary Mandarin.

They come from Hong Kong and consist of a series of books:

•         An Interactive Online Classroom with over 1000 activities and games
•         240 Chinese Readers ranging from beginner to advanced, organized into a six-color coded system
•         48 Big Books which are great for classroom use (for the teacher to show as she reads aloud)
•         8 sets of Flashcards with 400 Chinese characters to reinforce character recognition and learning
•         13 Max and Mei storybooks with rich cultural references for younger readers
•             4 Pangu Comic books with beautiful illustrations for advanced readers

They’re available in the United States from China Sprout.