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To the editor:

Thank you, Karin deJonge-Kannan, for your excellent, informative letter (“Monolingualism can be cured,” May 16) about Dual Language Immersion (DLI) programs in Utah schools, where participating students learn academic content in another language in addition to English. A year ago, I visited Uintah Elementary School in Ogden with a couple of Chinese-American colleagues from Weber State University’s College of Education. We all agreed our visit to a second-grade Mandarin Chinese dual immersion classroom was one of the most exciting experiences of our professional careers. The atmosphere in that room was electric — kids excited and motivated to learn, teacher excited to teach. I don’t speak Mandarin, but my colleagues were astounded at the proficiency of those 7- and 8-year-olds. After hunkering down to talk with a couple of students in the corner of the room, the colleague from Nanjing whispered excitedly to me, “They have no accent!”

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More than a decade after the state urged that students start learning a foreign language in the early grades, many local elementary schools are losing ground.

Immersion programs, in which children study all of their subjects in the second language, are thriving in a few communities. But traditional foreign language classes, often for a few hours a week, have disappeared from elementary schools in Arlington, Bellingham, Franklin, Littleton, Marlborough, Needham, Newton, Norfolk, and Shrewsbury.

The cutbacks are largely due to tight budgets and high-stakes testing in other subjects, officials say.

“It’s really budget,” said Kathleen Bodie, superintendent of Arlington’s school system, which dropped its Spanish program for kindergarten through third grade.

“People would love to have an elementary language program,’’ Bodie said. “In terms of brain development, that is the ideal time to learn a language. It’s much more difficult as we get older.”

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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 Spanish immersion for its students who have completed the programs at the elementary level.

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Principal Bryan Bordelon tries to reassure parents taking a chance on his new school: Don’t panic when you can’t understand your 4-year-old’s assignments.

Your child may even tell secrets in a language you don’t understand, he says. That’s a good thing. It means the students are learning.

Bordelon is leading a new public elementary school in Bellaire that will immerse mostly English-speaking students in Mandarin Chinese, teaching them to read, write and speak a language with growing importance in the global business arena.

The Houston Independent School District campus, which will open in August, is one of the first schools in Texas to offer a Mandarin immersion program and is among a small but growing number nationwide.

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