Summer Institutes for Immersion Teachers

CARLA also offers these popular institutes that are designed specifically for immersion educators:

Immersion 101: An Introduction to Immersion Teaching for Chinese and Japanese
July 21–25, 2014
Presenters: Tara Fortune and a team of veteran immersion teachers
This institute provides novice immersion teachers of character-based languages with the tools and information they need to survive and thrive in the immersion classroom. The institute also includes a two-day session for administrators of immersion education programs for character-based languages.

Immersion 101: An Introduction to Immersion Teaching 

July 28–August 1, 2014
Presenters: Tara Fortune and a team of veteran immersion teachers
This institute provides novice immersion teachers with the tools and information they need to survive and thrive in the immersion classroom. The institute has been reconfigured to offer two teacher sessions simultaneously and an expanded 3-day session for administrators of immersion education programs.

Information

More information is available on the CARLA website at:www.carla.umn.edu/institutes.

Registration will open on January 6, 2014.
To request a copy of a print brochure you can email the CARLA office at:carla@umn.edu.

The institutes have been developed and are offered with the support, in part, of the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI Language Resource Center program. The summer institutes are co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development and College of Liberal Arts.

More here.

I got some fun new additions from Los Angeles. Keep ’em coming…

 

• When the birthday cake comes out at a party, you start singing “Ju ni sheng ri kuai le” and then quickly realize everyone else is singing “Happy Birthday To You.”

 

• When you reach into your purse for Kleenex, you come out with a handful of flashcards.

 

• You have seriously considered moving to another state for a Mandarin immersion program.

 

• All the CDs in your car are in Chinese.

 

• When you are ridiculously excited that your child can read some of the characters on the back of the hot sauce bottle at a Chinese restaurant.

 

• When your child runs up to anyone who looks even remotely Asian and starts up a conversation in Mandarin.

 

• Your third grader is starting to lose it over homework so you offer to race him looking up characters by stroke order. You beat him.

 

• You learned to belt out the entire chorus of “Gong Xi Gong Xi” or “Liang Zhi Lao Hu” long before you could say basic phrases in Chinese.

 

• You forget that “hongbao” is not an English word, and that non-Chinese or MI friends may not know what’s inside.

 

• You are instinctively wary of dumplings around Chinese New Year, due in part to years of overconsumption, and in part to an unfortunate coin-biting incident.

 

• You know what Yellowbridge.com is and you know how to use it.

 

• You have strong preferences in moon cakes types, and know how to answer the question, “One egg yolk, two or none?”

 

• Your kid says “I have to fuxi for my kaoshi, but after that I’m done with my gongke” and you understand her.

 

• You know who the biggest K-pop stars are and have their songs, with Chinese subtitles, bookmarked on your computer.

 

• You own more Chinese dictionaries than English dictionaries.

 

• You can explain to a kindergarten parent what a measure word is, and get it right.

 

• You can pick out your child’s handwriting on the bulletin board outside his classroom, even though the papers are all in Chinese.

 

• You forget that in most schools teachers will speak to you in English when there are kids around.

 

• You discover that your middle schooler has figured out that Siri on the iPhone can speak Mandarin. Her class is now speaking their essays into the phone and letting Siri write them out, then going in and cleaning up the characters Siri got wrong. You can’t figure out if this is cheating or a brilliant use of the technology.

 

• Other parents dream of Harvard and UCLA. You find yourself considering the relative merits of Beijing University and Tsinghua University.

 

*A non-Chinese speaking MI parent, that is.

 

Computer scientist and Mandarin speaker Nathan Yeung at Brigham Young University has updated his spectacular map of all the Mandarin immersion schools in the United States, based on the database I’ve compiled. It’s a great way to find what schools are nearest to you.

Enjoy! And pass along the link to others, Nathan’s site isn’t getting the traffic is deserves. It’s a wonderful resource.

You can access it here:

http://chineseimmersionschools.com

 

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.