Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education

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  • Pasadena’s Mandarin immersion program

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    From the parents at Field Elementary’s Mandarin immersion program:

    In the spring of 2013 the administrators and parents involved with the The Mandarin Dual Language Immersion Program (MDLIP) at Eugene Field Elementary School received some bad news. The U.S. government Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP) grant that had funded the start-up costs of the program, and continued to nurture the nascent program, had been cut!  The Field program needed that FLAP grant money to help pay the bills involved with the continued growth of the program.

    As many of the Mandarin Immersion Parent Council members know, it’s not inexpensive to operate an immersion program.  Field’s program shares many of the costs associated with running a traditional immersion program, however, unlike many mandarin immersion programs that follow a 50:50 (50% English, 50% Mandarin) teaching model in all grades, Field follows a 90:10 teaching model.  Under the 90:10 model students are taught in Mandarin for 90% of the class day at the kindergarten level, 80% in first grade, 70% in second grade, 60% in third grade and 50% from fourth grade through the twelfth grade.  Under the 90:10 model, Mandarin teachers are often not available to teach the English portion of the class day and therefore the program needs to find (and, of course, pay for) additional English teachers.

    Fortunately, the Field program has some great things going for it, including: incredibly involved and hard working parents, teaching staff and school administrators, and a location in the San Gabriel Valley close to one of the most vibrant Chinese expatriate communities in the world.

    First, let’s discuss the parents and staff. At Field during the last academic year 85% of parents volunteered in the classroom and at school-related activities during and outside of classroom instructional time last year.  When the FLAP grant was cut, these parents rolled up their sleeves and got busy raising funds.  These parents were immeasurably aided in their task by the flexible, creative (and generally just wonderful) teachers and administrators at Field.  The Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD) also provided additional funding to the Field program to help with the shortfall caused by the loss of the FLAP grant funds.

    In the program’s last fiscal year, parents raised over $100,000 to help fund the costs associated with the program by organizing school fundraising drives, reaching out for donations from businesses in the local community, and through the program’s first annual Gala “A Night in Beijing” which brought in over $40,000.  Thanks to the masterful planning of the Gala planning committee and the turnout from Field parents, teachers, PUSD administrators, and other members of the local community, the gala was a phenomenal success.

    Along with the large amount of money brought in, the Gala also helped to shine the spotlight on another considerable resource of the Field program, its location. The comedians at the Gala (who managed to keep the Gala crowd in stitches) found a great deal of comedy source material in the “Boba life” and other elements of the pervasive Asian food and culture within the San Gabriel Valley.

    Indeed, the San Gabriel Valley is one of the most popular U.S. destinations for recent Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants.  Asians are the ethnic majority in many of the cities within the San Gabriel Valley.  The local library for the City of San Marino, a neighbor to Pasadena, devotes a significant percentage of its shelves to books written in Chinese and offers Mandarin story time for children each week. Another city in the San Gabriel Valley, Monterey Park, was once marketed to prospective immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong as the “Chinese Beverly Hills,” and is said to have a higher concentration of Chinese than any other city in the United States.  The immersion students at Field are fortunate to learn Mandarin in an area with such an accessible Chinese culture.

    The Field program appears to have sufficiently weathered the storm that arose due to the loss of FLAP grant funding. And, going forward, the Field program appears to have a bright future because of its involved parent group, phenomenal Mandarin teachers and PUSD administrators, and an already vibrant and growing Chinese community located on its doorstep.

    Eugene Field Elementary School is located in the beautiful neighborhood of Sierra Madre, in Pasadena.  Even though the program was established in 2009, just a few years ago, it is one of the oldest programs in Southern California.  Interest in the program from families in Pasadena and nearby communities is considerable; students from all over Los Angeles County, including 13 different school districts, have enrolled in the program.  The program currently has 290 students enrolled in Pre-Kindergarten through the fifth grade and PUSD has committed to fund the program, as it adds a grade each year, all the way through the twelfth grade.

    If you have any questions about the Field program please feel free to visit www.PasadenaMandarinImmersion.com.

  • Mandarin immersion program grows in Casper, Wyo.

    Chinese and English: Dual language program grows in Casper, Wyo.

     
    November 09, 2013 6:00 pm  •  By LEAH TODD Casper Star Tribune

    CASPER, Wyo. – Anastasia Lite Li is a soft-spoken woman until her students enter the Chinese classroom.

    That’s when the 24-year-old Beijing native with a master’s degree in teaching Chinese as a second language comes alive.

    “Ni hao, Mackenzie,” Li said one recent Wednesday morning, bending to shake the hand of a blond girl walking through her classroom doorway. “Ni hao, Braxton.”

    Students in this kindergarten class at Paradise Valley Elementary in Casper know the drill: When the bell rings, the English ends. Their names are printed in English on strips of masking tape on a carpet near the back of the room, but little else is said or shown in English in Li’s classroom, which is the first of its kind in Wyoming.

    It is not a special program for gifted students, nor a language curriculum like what is offered in high schools across the state.

    Please read more here.

  • Dual language immersion is best of both worlds

    HOWARD STEPHENSON: Dual language immersion is best of both worlds

    Utah’s dual language immersion program gives elementary students the chance to become fluent in traditional languages as well as critical languages such as Mandarin Chinese. The first schools to begin dual immersion now have fifth-graders in the program.By: Howard Stephenson, Grand Forks Herald

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    DRAPER, Utah — For an additional annual cost of just $33 per student, tens of thousands of Utah students are becoming truly bilingual.

    Throughout the United States, public schools traditionally have focused on teaching foreign languages to middle and high school students. As a result, second language fluency has been, at best, modest.

    Brain researchers have learned that acquiring a second language as an adolescent or adult is significantly more challenging than learning the language as a child because the child’s brain has more language plasticity. Consequently, children pick up a second language more quickly, do not have an English accent in the second language and do not have to mentally translate between English and the second language.

    Please read more here.

  • In Utah, foreign language immersion becomes the norm

    GREGG ROBERTS and OFELIA WADE: In Utah, foreign language immersion becomes the norm

    It is Utah’s quest to give all students the chance to become linguistically proficient and culturally competent by mainstreaming Dual Language Immersion programs for students of diverse abilities, across all socioeconomic categories and in large and small communities throughout the state.By: Gregg Roberts and Ofelia Wade, Grand Forks Herald

    SALT LAKE CITY — Monolingualism is the illiteracy of the 21st century. On today’s world stage, multilingual skills and cultural competence have taken the lead roles, as the 21st century showcases the emerging professionals of a future competitive global workforce.

    Thus, it is Utah’s quest to give all students the chance to become linguistically proficient and culturally competent by mainstreaming Dual Language Immersion programs for students of diverse abilities, across all socioeconomic categories and in large and small communities throughout the state.

    Utah’s statewide initiative is a lofty, ambitious and unprecedented effort to improve language skills in ways that address the state’s business, government and education needs.

    In 2008, under the leadership of former Gov. Jon Huntsman, then-Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert and State Sen. Howard Stephenson, the Utah Legislature passed Senate Bill 41, providing funding for Dual Language Immersion programs and charging the Utah State Office of Education with creating a world-class immersion program.

    Please read more here.

  • Speaking more than one language may help delay dementia

    Speaking more than one language may help delay dementia

    Kim Painter, Special for USA TODAY4:02 p.m. EST November 6, 2013

    Speaking more than one language “stimulates your brain all the time,” researcher says.

    The latest evidence that speaking more than one language is a very good thing for our brains comes from a study finding dementia develops years later in bilingual people than in people who speak just one language.

    The study, conducted in India and published Wednesday in the journal Neurology, is not the first to reach this conclusion. But it is the largest and comes with an intriguing new detail: The finding held up even in illiterate people — meaning that the possible effect is not explained by formal education.

    Instead, the researchers say, there’s something special about switching from one language to another in the course of routine communication — something that helps explain why bilingual people in the study developed dementia five years later than other people did. When illiterate people were compared with other illiterate people, those who could speak more than one language developed dementia six years later.

    Please read more here.

  • Mandarin immersion in Australia

    Meet the Australian children fluent in Mandarin

    By Jon DonnisonBBC News, Melbourne

    Five-year-old Jackie Baldwin can give her name in Mandarin

    Australia’s politicians often talk about the importance of building ties with Asia. Successive governments have promised to increase the number of schools teaching Asian languages, but in fact the number of children in high school learning Asian languages is falling. The BBC’s Jon Donnison has been to one of the country’s few bilingual schools.

    Sitting cross-legged on the floor of her classroom, chewing on the end of her pen, five-year-old Jackie Baldwin is deep in thought.

    Blonde haired, with pink spectacles balanced on the tip of her nose, her hand begins to move steadily and confidently across her page, leaving a neat line of Mandarin Chinese characters.

    Among them I spot the letters “BBC” in the English alphabet.

    Please read more here.

  • Wyoming’s 1st Mandarin immersion school off to a good start

    Casper school seeks to make students bilingual

    Credit Willow Belden
    Kindergarteners in the dual language immersion program at Paradise Valley Elementary School spend half their day learning in Chinese.

    A school in Casper has started teaching some of its classes in Chinese. The idea is that the students in those classes will grow up bilingual. This is the first Chinese immersion program in a Wyoming school, but data from other states that have similar programs show a wide range of benefits. Wyoming Public Radio’s Willow Belden reports.

    Please read and listen here.