By Elizabeth Weise

Germany’s first Mandarin immersion program is still struggling to get the German educational establishment to recognize Chinese as language in which academic studies can be taught. The school, which launched in the fall of 2011, has been forced to settle for offering a Chinese language class to its students three times a week, rather than the immersion they had hoped for, said parent Jianqiu Wang.

The German Ministry of Education allows immersion schools in which core academic subjects are taught in the school’s target language, but only for European languages and in special cases Turkish. These include French, English, Spanish, Italian and Russian. Programs that want to teach in Chinese and Arabic have been proposed but not yet authorized, said Wang.

“It is frustrating. If you don’t have the status then all the subjects must be taught in German.”

The school is called the Deutsch-Chinesischen Grundschule (German-Chinese Elementary School). It was founded in September of 2011 at Planetarium Elementary School in Berlin.

In Germany a school must get permission from the German Senate to teach content subjects such as math or science in a language other than German. So far the school hasn’t been able to get that permission. Instead they’re making do with a program that has an “emphasis” on Chinese, Wang says. Students get three hours of Mandarin instruction per week. The school currently has three classes of 30 students for now, one of five-year-olds, one of six-year-olds and one of seven-year-olds.

The country’s educational establishment only recently began offering a teaching certificate in Chinese. Prior to that it was presumed that Chinese was only taught as a foreign language, at the high school or university level. “So we still have a way to go,” Wang said.

One concern has been the Abitur. That’s the exam all German students who want to attend University take at the end of high school. Scores on the Abitur determine whether one can attend university and which one. The exam is given in German and the state educational ministries are concerned that students taught in a non-European language would be at a disadvantage.

In Germany each state controls its educational organization and requirements. So far Berlin is the only state even considering allowing Chinese to be used as a language of instruction.

Lots of immersion, no Chinese

The parents who’ve sent their children to the school have embraced Chinese, far more than the German government. When the school’s director, Günter Urban, held a meeting of all the school’s parents just before the school opened, he explained that only six children had enrolled in the Mandarin program strand. He asked the other parents in Grade One (the equivalent of the U.S. Kindergarten) if they would like their children to participate in the four hour-a-week Mandarin classes.

All the German parents raised their hands.

When Herr Urban asked again “Are you sure you don’t want to think about it?” they all raised their hands a second time.

“It really surprised us,” says Wang, who helped start the new school.

Germany is awash in immersion schools. In Berlin alone there are 17. But they are called Europaschule (European Schools) and they focus on European languages. In Berlin, students can study 50% of their day in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Polish or Greek. The one exception is Turkish, used because of German’s large Turkish immigrant population

There are also many immersion preschools that offer immersion. Because of this, Wang thought for sure there would be a Mandarin preschool for her son and daughter. But when she went looking, she realized that there was not a single Chinese preschool in all of Berlin. Or in all of Germany, for that matter. There were Saturday Chinese schools but nothing that was immersion the way the Europaschule were.

Wang is from Shanghai but is married to a German. She speaks Mandarin, German and English fluently and her children are being brought up bilingually in both German and Mandarin. But she knew that “if they don’t learn to read and write, they’ll lose their culture.”

So she and a small group of Chinese and German parents in Berlin set out to first create a Mandarin preschool, called a Kindergarten in German. There were also two students from German-speaking families who had gone to preschool in China because their families were living there for work and had become fluent. But when they came back to Germany “they had no possibility to speak Chinese again at home or in school, so they forgot their Chinese. It was very sad,” Wang says.

Starting a parent-initiated preschool isn’t that difficult in Germany, so the families were able to create one, says Wang. It begins, as Kindergartens do in Germany, at age 1 and continues through age 4.

But when student turn 5 they being Grundschule, or elementary school. And there was no place for them to continue Chinese. So inspired by the co-founder of a French Europaschule, the families began discussing starting a public Chinese immersion elementary school.

“People told us that it’s not possible, that Chinese is too difficult a language for German students to learn. They can learn European languages, but not Chinese,” Wang says.
The parents knew better. They reached out to the public schools and Herr Urban, the principal of the Planetarium school, located next to Berlin’s planetarium, gave them very positive answer and support.

“He was very open-minded,” she says. Perhaps as importantly, he had the flexibility to take on more students because his school did not have enough students to fill all its classrooms.

About 50% of the families have at least one Mandarin-speaking parent, the rest are German speakers.  “Chinese is very popular here now,” says Wang. “We just heard from the Chinese embassy that China is the second most popular place for German students to want to do an exchange program with, after the United States. That surprised us.”

The school has benefited from San Francisco’s experience creating one of the country’s first Chinese immersion programs, the now-30-year-old Cantonese immersion program at West Portal Elementary school in San Francisco. “We’ve been talking to Jenny Lee, the teacher at West Portal, and she’s been helping us,” says Wang. The program uses the Better Chinese books, which are used at many Mandarin immersion programs in the United States. There are no German-Mandarin textbooks for elementary schools available.

“The American experience has been really helpful to us, because otherwise there wouldn’t be anywhere for us to go to ask questions,” says Wang.

Chinese immigrants in Germany are primarily Mandarin-speaking, says Wang. The country does not have the historical connection to Cantonese that many immigrant communities in the United States have. For that reason they chose to use simplified characters, as that’s what most families in the program already read.

As in the Europaschule, they plan to teach math and German in German while science, social studies and Mandarin will be taught in Mandarin. Like all German schools, English classes will begin at age 7.

There’s a small bit of tension between the German and Chinese educational styles, though it’s not that big a problem, says Wang. Chinese families want higher levels of Chinese because the language is part of their culture. But German parents are against pushing kids hard to learn. They say ‘It should be fun, we don’t need too much pressure.’ But we’ll find a way to balance both,” she says.

US-China summit: California welcomes rise of Asian giant

The run down Oakland waterfront has seen a $1.5bn investment from China

Five-year-old Eli is perhaps the face of America’s future.

He looks a little nervous going in front of his 15 fellow pupils in his kindergarten class in a San Francisco school and reading out the children’s duties for the day.

His nerves are understandable. He’s speaking in a difficult, foreign language – Mandarin Chinese.

Behind him, an elegantly drawn poster of the sea, the sun, clouds and a ship, their names spelt out in Chinese characters.

This is Presidio Knolls School, where they practise what they call “total immersion” learning, speaking Chinese from day one.

Here, on the Pacific Ocean, where a third of the population are ethnic Chinese, President Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia seems only natural.

Eli’s mother, Mikhal Bouganim, says: “As an economic and cultural force in our world, it feels like an appropriate language to learn.

“And we have this little Jewish kid running around talking Chinese, and we thought it was important for him to realise not everyone looks like him or sounds like him.”

Please read more here.

Other Views: GF schools should ask for language immersion

By: Grand Forks Herald, The Jamestown Sun

Link here.

Houston, where everything is big, even the Mandarin immersion schools

By Elizabeth Weise

To the rest of the country this might seem like an odd statement, but here goes. If you were going to design the best public Mandarin immersion school you possibly could, it would probably look a lot like the one that launched in September of 2012—in Houston, Texas.

Houston? Really.

Yes, Houston. Really. When the Houston Independent School District decided to create a Mandarin immersion school it didn’t do as many districts do:

• Houston didn’t make Mandarin a single strand in a larger school, making it impossible for the school’s culture to focus on Chinese.
• Houston didn’t put just one classroom per grade in, which makes for tiny classes in the upper grades as students move, often requiring a difficult to teach fourth/fifth split grade class.
• Houston didn’t place it as one small strand in a larger low performing school to bring in active parents, launching a school with a host of tensions between the strands over funding and emphasis.
• Houston didn’t make the school K – 5 and then jump to a middle school where the Mandarin students would be a tiny proportion of students in a much larger school.
• Houston didn’t start from scratch, expecting its newly-hired teachers to somehow create a program out of whole cloth as they also taught full-time, burning them out in the process.

Instead, Houston did it Texas-sized.

In August of 2012, the Houston Unified School District opened a 100% Mandarin immersion school, its first. It began with Kindergarten, first and second grade. In its first year there were 250 students and the school will add a grade a year until it reaches eighth grade in 2018-2019. When it is fully built out it will be home to 950 students. This year’s Kindergarten had four classes totaling 88 students, an extremely lucky number in Chinese –and clearly just as lucky for the families who got in on the ground floor as well.

The school has been wildly successful, especially for a new, untried program in a language that’s never been taught in a Houston elementary school before. “It’s been phenomenal.” Being in a whole-school environment rather than one strand in a larger school has allowed him to focus on Chinese “rather than this is the neat little quirk we can offer for 25 to 50 kids,” says principal Bryan Bordelon, 30.

It’s worked. “We currently have more people on the wait list for our entire school than we have total enrolled students.”

In fact pretty much the only thing Houston did that seems even a little off is the ungainly name they saddled the school with. It’s officially the Mandarin Chinese Language Immersion Magnet School. Even its acronym, MCLIMS, doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

As to why Chinese in Texas, Bordelon says that while Texas may seem a more likely home for Spanish immersion, Houston is actually an extremely international city. It has a very large business population that works with Asia, so much so that there is a Chinese consul in the city. With so many international oil and energy companies headquartered there, businesses are clamoring for multilingual workers. The school is already talking to large corporations about support for the program.

Keeping the middle class in public schools

One of the really wonderful outcomes of the way they created the Mandarin immersion school is that it’s been a true magnet for a large number of families who otherwise would have sent their children to private schools or moved to the suburbs. From the numbers, a high percentage of those families were white and Asian, the type of families that all too often leave the public schools. While Houston itself is about 25% non-Hispanic white, white students make up just 11% of the school district. Asians are overrepresented at the school, Houston’s population is 6% Asian as of the 2012 census.

As multiple other schools nationwide have found, Mandarin immersion is a powerful carrot to keep families in the public school system. In fact the school sits across the street from two private schools, an Episcopal high school and the Post Oak School, both of which cost in the $30,000 a year range.

But instead parents are knocking down the door to get into Mandarin immersion. The waiting list is long and getting longer,” said parent James Troutman. “Which is like ‘Hello, Houston? You need another school!”

Far from creating a segregated school that was primarily white and Asian, as many districts fear will happen, the Mandarin school is extremely mixed. The student body is made up of 25% Asian students, 25% African-American students, 25% white students and 25% Hispanic students. “We pull from 63 zip codes. We truly represent the city,” Bordelon said.

What the school doesn’t have is many Mandarin speakers, just 5% of the incoming students speak Mandarin at home. For now the program is one-way.

Active parents

Houston is a zoned school district, meaning students are assigned to schools in their local zone. But the Chinese school is not zoned so families must apply to get in, no one is automatically assigned there. That makes for a “very willing parent body,” says Bordelon. “They made this choice, no one’s zoned to us—everyone has to apply.”

The families who come are engaged and active in the extreme. The school’s newly-created Parent-Teacher Organization hit the ground running. It held a large fundraiser in the spring and ended the year with $16,000 in the bank, pretty impressive for a first year organization.

Placement

The one complex part of the endeavor has been the placement of the school. It took over the building of an existing but very poorly-enrolled school called Gordon Elementary.  Gordon was an overflow school. When there were too many students from a nearby zone to go to their zoned school, they were sent to Gordon.

Now the English program that was at Gordon is being phased out and for the 2013-2014 school year there are fewer than 50 students from it who will finish out fifth grade there, said Bordelon. While they’re there “we’re working hard to make sure that it isn’t two separate campuses.” Those students are able to take Chinese lessons once a day so they, too, are part of the broader Chinese focus of the school.

Set-up

To create its first Mandarin immersion program Houston chose to join the Flagship–Chinese Acquisition Pipeline consortium. That’s the closest thing there is to “Mandarin immersion in a box.” Anchored by the Utah State Department of Education, home to 26 Mandarin immersion schools, F-CAP includes six state departments of education and individual school districts in 18 other states. It’s a bit like the International Baccalaureate program in that it provides member schools with a roadmap and instructions on how to set up and run a program. F-CAP offers a national model for a K-12 Chinese immersion curriculum, textbooks, support and a yearly teacher and staff training summit in Utah each summer.

Joining the consortium “has been a phenomenal connection for us,” said Bordelon. “We’re not reinventing the wheel, the professional development opportunities for our teachers is amazing.”

Remarkably, Bordelon was able to hire almost all the teachers he needed from within the Houston school system. The sprawling and enormous district includes 273 schools and 11,000 teachers. It turned out that there were a surprising number who spoke Mandarin fluently. Bordelon had to hire six Chinese teachers this year and had 65 applicants. “I had one teacher who’s trilingual. She was born in China, raised in Costa Rica and then spent 17 years teaching in a Spanish bilingual school.”

Moving into high school should be easy. Bordelon said he’s already had multiple Houston high school principals approach him about how they can get ready to attract his graduating eight graders come 2019.

The school was also lucky with its first principal. Bordelon’s father worked for an oil company and he spent much of his childhood overseas, in Indonesia, Qatar and Venezuela. He then studied Mandarin at the University of Texas, when ton to attend a summer immersion program at Middlebury College in Vermont and lived in China for a year.

Getting the program up and running is “one of the things I’m most proud of,” he said. “I can’t lie and say it wasn’t hard work. They announced the school in December of 2011. They started taking applications in January of 2012 and there was literally nothing. I was named to the position in February 2012 and basically told ‘Create a Mandarin immersion school. Go!”

He proved to be so good at his job that HISD is moving him up to a new position, launching a college readiness program across the district. They’re in the process of hiring a new principal but Bordelon doesn’t think that will be a problem “because we’re off to such a strong start.”

How it got started

Houston is also extraordinary in how it got its Mandarin program. In most schools parents are the ones who want Chinese immersion and they spend years trying to convince their school district that it’s a good idea. Often the most committed parents give up when their children have to enter Kindergarten or first grade and become too old to join whatever program eventually gets created. That leaves the core group constantly working to attract new members even as it while the school district ponders the idea.

In Houston things went very differently. The biggest champion has been the school board itself, whereas in many districts it’s the major stumbling block. Board member Harvin Moore had focused on the idea since taking two education-related trips to China. He’s also visited a Mandarin immersion program in San Diego, where Houston Superintendent Terry Grier used to work. “Much of the push to create an immersion school was based on those two individuals,” Bordelon said.

What’s the future hold?

            Clearly Houston’s model only works in a large school district with enough schools that turning one into a full-immersion program leaves enough space in English programs. A small school district with just a handful of elementary schools would be hard pressed to make a case for creating an all-immersion school simply because it would restrict family choices far too much. But in a large district like Houston, which has 276 schools, turning one or more all-immersion creates rather than restricts choices.

The Houston Independent School District also has two Spanish immersion schools as well as multiple Spanish bilingual programs. But beyond those three it contains no other immersion schools. The Mandarin program is on the west side of town and it has proven so popular that there is talk of opening another Chinese immersion school on the west side. But others have suggested opening another immersion school in another language.

When another immersion school will open, and what language it will teach, remains to be seen. But clearly Houston is a school district that has put itself on the map by creating a robust, wildly popular and high-performing Chinese immersion program with none of the baggage that causes so many programs to struggle. Other large urban school district would do well to learn from their example.

Mandarin in Montgomery County, Maryland

By Elizabeth Weise

The oldest public Mandarin immersion program in the country was founded in 1996 at Potomac Elementary, in the town of Potomac, Maryland. It’s one of seven immersion schools in the Montgomery County Public Schools.

The district has a very long history of immersion. Its French Immersion Magnet Program began in 1974, Spanish in 1977 and Mandarin in 1996. Immersion is popular in the district and it is now home to seven immersion elementary schools out of a total of 133. Two are offered in French, three in Spanish and two in Mandarin. In 2012-2013 a total of 647 students applied for one of 286 available Kindergarten immersion seats, said Michael Herlihy, the lead teacher for Chinese immersion and English for Speakers of Other Languages.

The school district’s programs are a blend of several different immersion models. Some schools offer full immersion, where 100% of the class day is taught in either French or Spanish. Others offer what the district terms ‘partial immersion’ though all are at least 50% of the day in the target language. In most other school districts that 50/50 model is considered full immersion.

French

It all started with Française. French immersion in the district originally began at Four Corners Elementary School in 1974. The program moved twice and ended up at Maryvale Elementary School in Rockville in 1992. That school served students living in the northern part of the county and was so popular that in the 1999-2000 school year a second French immersion program was launched at Sligo Creek Elementary in Silver Spring to serves students in the southern part of the county.

Students receive all their subject matter instruction in French. In Kindergarten through third grade French is the only language used in the classrooms. In fourth grade  students are given instruction in English twice a week for 45 minutes during the second half of the school year. In fifth grade students are given instruction in English for approximately four hours each week. Special subjects, i.e., art, music, and physical education, are also conducted in English in all grades.

This works out to approximately 80% of the school time spent in French in the early grades, approximately 60% in fifth grade and 30% in grades 6 though 8. In middle school students get two French-language blocks taught totally in French, one French Language Arts and one World Studies, at either Silver Spring International Middle School or Gaithersburg Middle School. Successful completion of the sequence allows the student to enter French 4 or French 5 honors classes in 9th grade.

Spanish

The Spanish program at Rock Creek Forest Elementary was founded in 1977 with one class of first, second and third graders. It has grown from that one multi-age class to two classes at each grade level for a total of twelve classes of Spanish immersion from kindergarten through fifth grade. Two other schools were later added.

Rock Creek Forest Elementary offers what the school district terms “full immersion.” In kindergarten through third grade, Spanish is the only language used in the classrooms. It isn’t until fourth grade that students begin to receive English instruction and at that point it’s only twice a week for forty-five minutes during the second semester of the school year. In fifth grade they get English four times a week English for 45 minutes.

Because art, music, physical education and media center/library classes are also taught in English in all grades, students don’t spend 100% of their day in Spanish, however. In Kindergarten through third grade it’s approximately 72%, in fourth grade it’s 67% and in fifth grade 62%. In middle school they get two classes, Spanish Language Arts and World Studies, for a total of 29% of their school time in Spanish.

Upon successful completion of the middle school program, students are usually placed in level 4 Spanish in high school.

The district’s other two Spanish immersion schools offer what the district calls ‘partial immersion’ thought again, it would be considered full immersion in most other schools. At Burnt Mills Elementary and Rolling Terrace Elementary schools, students get all their instruction in Spanish in Kindergarten and first grade. In second through fifth grades math and science are taught in Spanish, about 50% of the day. Reading, English language arts and social studies are taught in Spanish. In fourth and fifth grades students get math and science.

Mandarin

Seventeen years ago there were just two other Mandarin immersion programs in the nation, both private and both in the San Francisco Bay area. That year, 1996, saw the opening of Potomac’s Mandarin program and two other private Mandarin programs. They were the International School of the Peninsula in Palo Alto, Calif. and the International School in Portland, Ore., which began offering Mandarin in 1996 after starting with Spanish in 1990 and Japanese in 1995.

The next public schools Mandarin immersion program didn’t come until two years later, in 1998 with the opening of Shuang Wen School (Public School 184) in New York City and Portland, Oregon’s public Woodstock Elementary.

Potomac Elementary School’s Mandarin immersion program was founded at the start of the 1996-1997 school year. College Gardens Elementary began a second Mandarin program in 2005-2006. In the Montgomery county program students spend half their day being taught in Chinese and the other half in English. Math and science curricula are taught in Chinese. English reading, language arts and social studies are taught in English.

All Montgomery County immersion program use the same curriculum for all students, only the language it is offered in varies. “We’re just teaching it in Chinese, but it is the MCPS curriculum,” said Herlihy. “Our teachers teach a split day.  For instance, one teacher will teach Kindergarten Mandarin in the morning and then first grade Mandarin in the afternoon,” said Herlihy.

In addition students receive one hour of direct language instruction in Chinese each week. The program continues at Hoover Middle School with two classes per day, one in Mandarin language arts and one in World Studies. When students get to high school at Winston Churchill High they can enter the regular Chinese language track, including Advanced Placement, Herlihy said.

Potomac and College Gardens both offer just one Mandarin immersion class per grade level, for a total of six classes per school. At Potomac Elementary there are 520 students, with 180 of them in the Mandarin program, which makes up one-third of the student body, Herlihy said.

The demographics at the schools are primarily white and Asian. At Potomac fewer than 5% of students receiving free or reduced price lunch. At College Gardens the figure is 19.2%.

The program uses simplified characters and is meant for students who are not native speakers of Chinese. However because of its proximity to Washington D.C. with its diplomatic corps and various other international agencies, there are many students who arrive having spent time in China. “We usually have some students who came from Beijing because their families were stationed there. We also have a number of heritage speakers in our classes,” said Herlihy.

The program is extremely popular. “It’s usually over-enrolled, there’s a waiting list,” said Herlihy.

Overall students in the Chinese program do “as well if not better than the general education students. “There’s a little lag at the beginning but they catch up and often outstrip them by fourth and fifth grade on standardized tests,” Herlihy said. The students achieve proficiency in Chinese and have near-native accents, visiting Chinese speakers have told teachers.

“The skill set here is really focused on listening and speaking because it’s immersion. When they get to secondary school there is more emphasis on reading and writing,” he said. Students get actual Chinese language arts training one hour a week. While “from Kindergarten on up they do reading and writing in Chinese, that’s not the emphasis” in elementary, he said.