Language immersion: How far do we go?

Pair of school board members wowed by Minnetonka program

BY REBECCA RANDALL

The Lake Oswego Review, Nov 24, 2011 (2 Reader comments)

Lake Oswego School Board members Teri Oelrich and Bob Barman witnessed the lesson during their recent trip to Minnetonka and came back raving about how the experience will benefit school board members poised to make a decision on whether to offer language immersion in grades 1 through 5.

Oelrich and Barman traveled on their own dime along with Sarah Howell and Lara James, two Lake Oswego parents who are big proponents of implementing a similar language immersion model here.

Minnetonka has a lot of similarities to Lake Oswego, Ore., and so it made sense to the travelers to learn from that district. Minnetonka is a city of 49,000 with a median household income of $79,720. Its school district is similarly configured with six elementary schools, two middle schools and one high school. When the school district decided to implement language immersion, it considered a magnet model but, like Lake Oswego, its citizens value neighborhood schools. Instead, the district unrolled the new program at each of its schools in 2007.

Read more here.

In second year of Chinese immersion, Orem students excel

Spenser HeapsWei Xin Le teaches a first grade Chinese immersion class at Cascade Elementary in Orem on Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2011. SPENSER HEAPS/Daily Herald

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Related Links

• Alpine School District

OREM — It must be one of the most singularly astonishing sights in any classroom in Utah Valley — first-graders being taught entirely in Chinese, even though they didn’t know a single word of the language until four months ago.

Alpine School District’s hugely successful Chinese language immersion program was the first of its kind here two years ago. Today, it is one of the district’s biggest success stories. The pilot group, now in second grade, has learned to speak Chinese so quickly and so fluently that the district is looking to expand the immersion program into other languages and other schools. An announcement could be made before Christmas.

Read more: http://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/central/orem/in-second-year-of-chinese-immersion-orem-students-are-fluent/article_cb94b573-dbb4-5fe0-b578-64abd04b61c6.html#ixzz1ejfAcGIB

The folks at the new Mandarin immersion school in Berlin have translated our FAQ into German. Kind of fun….

From Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition.

If you care about immersion, you should join them. They have a great newsletter. -Beth

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Summer Institutes for Immersion Teachers

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

Immersion 101: An Introduction to Immersion Teaching for Character-Based Languages
June 25-29, 2012
Presenters: Tara Fortune and Molly Wieland
This institute provides novice immersion teachers in 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 23-27, 2012
Presenters: Tara Fortune and Veteran Immersion Educators
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 a newly expanded 3-day session for administrators of immersion education programs.

Meeting the Challenges of Immersion Education: Counterbalanced Instruction in the Immersion Classroom
July 30-August 3, 2012
Presenter: Roy Lyster
This institute will provide a fresh perspective on integrating language and content in the immersion classroom.

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

Registration will open on January 2, 2012.
To request a copy of a print brochure you can email the CARLA office at: carla@umn.edu.

A great Mandarin show for your kids to watch

Many thanks to Liyao, who told me about this show.

It’s called 家有儿女, Jia you nu er (Home with Kids in English.) and it’s kind of The Brady Bunch in Chinese.

It’s about a Chinese father who lives in America and has two children, a son and a daughter. From the introduction, I think in St. Louis. He gets divorced and moves back to China. There he meets a divorced woman with a younger son. They fall in love and get married and all five of them live together.

I watched the first two episodes with my 3rd and 5th grader and they were able to get most of what was going on, to the point of laughing hysterically at certain points.

Here’s the first two episodes (as translated for me by my children:

1. The couple meet and although their kids are very opposed to the idea, especially the girl, they marry. There’s a very funny scene of a tense lunch where the mom tried to get the girl to be nice but fails.

2. The girl decides she’s going to get her dad back for remarrying, so she pays a middle school classmate to pretend to be her boyfriend – a totally unacceptable thing for a middle school student in China. The parents are horrified and confront the boy, who confesses that she paid him to go along with the pretense. Then the parents decide to go along with it to. When she says she’s going to his house they say “ke yi!” (you may) and then when she’s really annoyed they’re agreeing with her she says she’s going to spend the night and they say “ke yi!” and she loses it, appalled they’d let her do such a thing.

Finally she gives up.

Then the little boy starts saying “I love you” to a classmate and the girl’s dad comes to complain. (Interesting sociological issue here, he’s clearly from the South and has a strong accent, not sure what it all means exactly” and they say it’s all a mistake but then the little boy keeps saying “Dudu, I love you!” in English.

Anyway, a great show for kids and not so hard to find online:

First go to                                                        http://tv.sohu.com/

This is 搜狐视频的 website. It is an entertainment website.

After you open it, try to find the two characters “搜索”(it means “search”)，and then next to “搜索”, you can input “家有儿女”, then click on “搜索”.

It should come up with a list of items which contains “家有儿女” characters. Usually, on the top of the list, it would be the soap opera “家有儿女”

with 第1集(episode 1)，第2集(episode 2), etc.

It should come with 100 episodes.

He pegs it at about $25,000 Australian dollars a year. Public school immersion starts to look like a pretty amazing deal from the perspective. But we only know of one possible immersion program in Australia. Are there others?

Minding our languages

Hugh White

November 8, 2011OPINION

Illustration: John Spooner

The countries of Asia are becoming more and more central to our future – economically, politically, socially, strategically, culturally.

As Julia Gillard has said, this is the Asian century, and no country has more at stake in it than Australia. The countries of Asia are becoming more and more central to our future – economically, politically, socially, strategically, culturally. But as Asia becomes increasingly important to us, fewer Australians are learning about it. Nothing governments have tried in recent years seems to make any difference. It is time for some fresh thinking.

This is not a new problem. The number of Australians learning Asian languages and about Asian societies has been shrinking for years. The teaching of key languages such as Japanese and Indonesian is in danger of disappearing from secondary schools – the combined result of too few students and too few teachers. And with only a tiny handful of exceptions, the only students who learn Chinese at school are those of Chinese background.

The same thing is happening at universities. Asian languages are attracting fewer and fewer students, and those they do attract have not studied an Asian language at school, so their university courses start from scratch. That means the standard most can reach in a three or four-year degree program is pretty basic. In turn, that means the number of well- qualified teachers going into the secondary system is falling, which drives down the numbers who will start to learn Asian languages at school. A classic vicious circle.

Read more here.