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Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education
recent posts
- Fourth grade Mandarin immersion students from Maryland sing for First Lady
- Utah’s Chinese Dual Language Immersion Program serves 12,000 students in 98 schools
- Chapel Hill NC superintendent wants to to disband 24-year-old Mandarin immersion program
- Wyoming’s only Mandarin immersion program going strong
- Chapel Hill Mandarin immersion program move stirs anger
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Apply to lead a session at the 2014 NCLC
The success of the National Chinese Language Conference is built upon the innovation, best practices, and shared experiences of educators and administrators in the field. Share your ideas and successes by leading a session at the 2014 NCLC. The Request for Proposals is now open – submit a proposal today! Deadline extended to December 23, 2013.
As a session presenter, you will have an opportunity to:
- share your knowledge and experiences, and gather valuable feedback from peers;
- showcase your educational programs and partnerships to a national audience;
- help shape the agenda of the Chinese language education community; and
- receive a discount on your registration fee.
We are seeking proposals in the following areas:
- New! Contemporary China
- New! Higher Education
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Partnerships and Community Engagement
- Assessment
- Program Models and K–16 Articulation
- Teacher Development and Sustainability
- Teacher Swap Shop
- Technology Forum
- Research Colloquium
NCLC is the premier conference dedicated to the teaching and learning of Chinese language and culture. Last year, 1,300 participants from across K–16 education came together to network and share best practices. Join us in Los Angeles next May 8–10! Learn more and find updates atAsiaSociety.org/NCLC.
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Radicals Reveal the Order of Chinese Characters
(Asia Society)
By Heather Clydesdale
Mastering Chinese is daunting, in large part because learners must memorize thousands of distinct characters. So it is both a revelation and a relief to learners when they discover radicals.
Radicals organize the chaotic swarm of characters into a logical system. Traditional Chinese groups all characters according to 214 radicals (simplified uses 189), which are organized based on number of strokes into a chart called the bushou. Each radical is itself a freestanding character-word, such as one, woman, child, cliff, field, tree, millet, halberd, leather, and bird.
Once inducted into radicals, students can look up characters in a dictionary without knowing the pronunciation. In addition, they can more deeply appreciate the characters they know, guess the meaning of new ones they encounter, and more efficiently memorize them.
For these reasons, Mingquan Wang, senior lecturer and language coordinator of the Chinese program at Tufts University, insists that radicals should be a part of the curriculum for teaching Chinese as a foreign language. “The question is,” he says, “how that should be done.” In spring of 2013, Wang sent an online questionnaire to 60 institutions, including colleges and K–12 schools. Of the 42 that responded, 100% agreed that teachers of Chinese language should cover radicals, yet few use a separate book or dedicate a course to radicals, and most simply discuss radicals as they encounter them in textbooks.
Please read more here.
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Do misplaced commas make you mad? Does seeing it’s when its is meant make you want to scream? Do misspellings leap off the page as you read?
Then I need you.
My book, “A Parent’s Guide to Mandarin Immersion,” is almost done. It’s in final edits with the content editor, but it will need copy editing as well. I’m doing this as a labor of love and will be publishing the book through Amazon’s ebook and print-on-demand service, so I don’t have the expertise of a traditional publishing house at my disposal.
I’m wondering if it’s possible to crowd-source copy editing. My idea is to have each chapter read by at least two people who will look for typos, misspelling and other mistakes. You could read as many or as few chapters as you’d like. There are 30 all together.
You wouldn’t get anything but the undying gratitude of the Mandarin immersion community–and a sneak preview of the book, of course. And the warm knowledge that you’ve made the world a slightly safer place for those who know their way around a serial comma.
No special training needed, just a sharp eye. I anticipate having chapters ready for copy editing by the first of the year.
If you’re interested, please drop me a line at: beth@elizabethweise.com
Many thanks, happy holidays and 圣诞快乐!
Beth Weise (rhymes with Geese)
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Posted: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 9:15 pm
Arika Herron/Winston-Salem Journal
Standing inside the doorway of Chunling Zhang’s second-grade class at Konnoak Elementary School, it can be hard to understand exactly what’s going on.
It looks like a traditional classroom — the walls are covered in posters, cutouts of farm animals and student work; students sit in rows of desks and raise their hands to answer questions.
Peeking in the door, though, visitors are greeted with a cheerful “ni hao.”
Zhang’s students are in their third year of Konnoak’s Chinese language immersion program. The majority of the day, she instructs the students in Mandarin Chinese.
Please read more here.
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MINNETONKA, Minn. – Fifth-grade students murmer to each other as they read through their text at Scenic Heights Elementary.
Bend in a little closer and you will hear they are speaking Mandarin Chinese. Scenic Heights and Excelsior each host Chinese immersion programs in the Minnetonka School District and now these students are ready to move on to middle schoool.
“We were told when we came into the program that there was a commitment to take it all the way through the high school,” said parent Nancy Getzkin whose son, David, is about to make the leap.
So is the Minnetonka District, which starting next year will offer Chinese and Spanishimmersion for its students who have completed the programs at the elementary level.
Please read more here.
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A very nice post from the Utah Mandarin Immersion Parents Council. New teachers need hand holding so they feel welcomed, especially teachers coming from far away. At our school, Starr King in San Francisco, there’s one mom who takes it upon herself to give each new teacher a day-long tour of the neighborhood where our school is and the neighborhood they live in (if they just moved to SF.) Simple things like knowing which supermarkets are expensive and which are more reasonable, where to get Chinese groceries, even where to park and not to park to keep your car from getting broken into (we are in the city after all) are really helpful to folks who are new to town.
Now that I write this I realize that mom’s youngest has moved on to middle school so I need to check with our PTA president about who will do the tour next year.
Beth
A warm Southern Utah welcome for Chinese guest teachers
If Utah leads the nation in Chinese language education with more public immersion programs than any other state, Washington County is the apotheosis.
Washington County School District – situated hundreds of miles south of the state’s bustling population center of Salt Lake – has five Chinese immersion programs, more than any other district.
It’s a feat that the district has managed, despite its relative isolation. There isn’t a ready pool of Chinese immigrants or university-trained Mandarin speakers from which to draw upon to staff the program. Instead, the district relies on guest teachers furnished through the Hanban, a division of the Ministry of Education in China. That, and good-old-fashioned hospitality.
Please read more here.
