When a Mandarin Chinese immersion program at Capistrano Unified was approved in September, the school board added a caveat that it be “revenue-neutral.”
Parents were asked to set up a foundation to funnel donations. Thalia Tong, one of the parents leading the effort, said her group has done just that.
The Bergeson Elementary Foundation, a registered nonprofit, has raised $2,000 of the $15,000 needed to launch the program.
“We’re trying to set up corporate sponsorship levels,” Ton said. “We’re really going big. We want the best for our children.”
Billed as the first public school program of its kind in Orange County, it might begin enrolling children as early as December, according to a Marian Bergeson Elementary newsletter.
“Our school board for CUSD will be voting this coming week on the possibility of an early open enrollment period for the Mandarin Immersion program,” the email, written by Principal Barbara Scholl, reports. “If this is approved, there will be early enrollment in December and then another enrollment period in February.”
The school board is scheduled to meet Nov. 14, but the agenda is not yet posted.
What Works in Chinese Language Immersion Programs?
and immersion experts at work. (Eleise Jones)
by Eleise Jones
In order to create linguistically and culturally competent speakers of Chinese, we must have innovative and effective programs in the early grades. The opportunities and challenges of teaching Chinese to early language learners are most clearly evident in language immersion programs, which offer the most intensive course of study available for early language learners. There are a number of pioneering schools and an active cohort of practitioners in this field, and clearly an ongoing need to develop and share models of excellence and best practices, and to create and disseminate resources for teachers, students, and leaders.
Earlier this month, Asia Society convened a meeting of language acquisition experts, practitioners, and program administrators from immersion and early language programs in Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Massachusetts, California, Wyoming, Washington, DC, and New York. This two-day intensive was chaired by Vivien Stewart and Mimi Met in preparation for a report on “what’s working in Chinese immersion,” which will be released in 2012 and will address best practices and key strategies in early Chinese language and immersion. The final report will be based on the recommendations of this working group, and will include a broader representation of schools and programs throughout the U.S.
When starting an immersion program, school communities have many questions and considerations. Some of the important issues identified by the task force include: What does immersion teaching look like? What is the fundamental mission of your program? How will you identify a model program that best meets the needs of your students? What are the qualifications of a Chinese language teacher? What are the similarities and differences between Chinese immersion and more commonly taught language immersion programs, such as Spanish and French? All of these questions, and more, will be addressed in the report – stay tuned!
Submit a Session Proposal
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 NCLC 2012. The Request for Proposals is now open – submit a proposal today!
It’s a trend, and a great one. Another bilingual parent, this time Christina Xue, a Kindergarten mom at Starr King Elementary school in San Francisco, has started doing a weekly pod-cast to help non-Chinese speaking parents figure out their kids’ homework.
It’s a simple thing, just walking through the week’s homework, pronouncing the words and showing how to write them. But for those of us who don’t have the knowledge, it’s huge. (That’s what I tell my kids when they complain we’re making them learn Mandarin – ‘We can’t, so we want you to be able to!’)
Thanks so much to the bilingual parents in our programs all over the country who do so much to help the monolingual families. You guys totally rock!
If a parent at your school is doing something similar, drop a line and we’ll post it on the blog. No need to re-invent the wheel, we can all learn from each other.
It hasn’t taken much to turn 1st grade mom Judy Shei into a YouTube celebrity – a computer, some index cards and a marker. That’s all the Starr King Elementary school parent needed to launch her career as a homework-helping broadcaster with her own channel on YouTube.
It all started because non-Mandarin speaking parents were feeling helpless when it came to their children’s Chinese homework. Not every family could afford a tutor. Shei, who learned Mandarin hardly at all in Saturday Chinese school growing up, and mostly by living in Taiwan for three years, felt that there was a need to bridge the gap between Mandarin and non-Mandarin speaking parents.
The purpose of the podcast is not only to provide the definition and pronunciation of the week’s vocabulary, which can be found easily on the internet, but to provide a more nuance explanation of how to use the words, a quickie lesson on related Chinese grammar, and finish off with an easy phrase the parents can practice with their kids.
The entire endeavor is very low tech. Just Shei (辥, pronounced Shay) and the video camera on her laptop. “YouTube has a function where you can record directly from a web cam,” she says, so she just sits down in front of the computer, goes to her YouTube channel and runs through the week’s lesson. The whole process takes about an hour a week. She tries to keep each week’s lesson under five minutes.
While she doesn’t make any claims to being a Mandarin teacher, because she taught English while living in Taiwan Shei has an idea of what language-learners need. “I know how English works, I also learned Mandarin as an adult, so I have a sense of how people might get tripped up between the languages.”
Shei says she is more conversational rather than fluent in Mandarin, ” I talk to my parents, I can have a conversation at a party but I couldn’t take part in a debate. My vocabulary is more around-the-house Chinese, not business Chinese.”
That’s quite enough for the needs of first graders and their parents. For example in this week’s lesson she explains why Chinese doesn’t have a specific word for Yes or No. “Chinese isn’t a yes-no language, it’s an echo-response language,” she says on the video. “There’s no one word for yes or no. You just have to listen to what the person is asking and to say yes you repeat the verb or adjective and to say no you say ‘not the verb’ or ‘not the adjective.’”
Of late the lessons have gotten a little more involved. She ponders the vocabulary words for the week and what might be helpful to parents who don’t speak Chinese.
“It takes me about an hour because I think about what I want to do and then I record it without any notes other than the index cards. I do a few takes because I don’t want to spend any time editing!” she says. “I don’t have any agenda, I don’t have a curriculum that I’m taking people through, I just take the homework we’ve got for this week and think about what I would want to know as a Chinese language learner.”
She’s gotten a lot of positive feedback from other first grade parents at Starr King and also from Jose Ortega elementary, Starr King’s sister school in the San Francisco Public Schools Mandarin immersion program. Both schools have the same curriculum so the lessons are the same across all three first grade classes, two at Starr King and one at Jose Ortega.
Shei says it’s easy to do and anyone whose Mandarin is up to the task should consider doing it for their class or school.
Other grade families also tell her they’re watching it, sometimes with their kids. “They say they’re learning about Chinese, so they watch it even though the homework isn’t appropriate for them.”
Shei’s down-to-earth, calm style probably helps there. The lessons are very simple to understand. She also throws in a few extra words by combining characters the students had already learned, such as 冬瓜 — dong gua, or winter melon, which she describes — and even tells you where you can buy one.
Already other classes are talking about doing something similar. Starr King’s 3rd grade Mandarin teacher, Ms. Chen, is considering having her students record their own homework videos. And other classes have discussed it as well.
And to make it all even better, Shei put Google AdSense on her YouTube channel. If it ever makes any money, it will all to go toward supporting the Mandarin program.
As she teaches at the end of this week’s lesson, 加油! (jiāyóu, literally “Give it the gas!” but it really means Go! Go! Go!)
Anna Hsu, 5 (second from r.) mimics teacher Kennis Wong as children sing a Chinese song at Broadway Elementary in Los Angeles, one of two English- Mandarin immersion programs.
Lucy Nicholson/Reuters/File
NEWARK, CALIF.
My daughter Bonoo Zahra, age 3, began preschool in August, and my worst fear about her education in the United States is coming true – English is invading her speech.
FREMONT, CALIFORNIA, USA – 27 SEPT 2011- Jose Henriquez, right, play basketball with his children Anthony, 8, left, and Jason, 5, center, at their home in Fremont, Calif., on Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2011.
Tony Avelar / The Christian Science Monitor
Before she began school, she exclusively spoke Farsi, our native Afghan language, but now she shuts the door to her room and prattles in English with her imaginary friends. She prefers to watch cartoons in English and wants me to read her books in English.
My husband, Naeem, and I decided our language at home would be Farsi so that our two daughters could learn to speak it. They would learn English in school and outside the home. After watching dozens of relatives’ and friends’ children in the US forget their native language, we are determined to teach Bonoo and Andisha, 5 months, the importance of bilingualism. But it’s a battle many second-generation immigrant parents have lost to the pervasiveness of English.
Besides preserving cultural heritage, a second language can boost careers, sharpen analytical skills, and encourage communication with a world outside one’s own.
The loss of language is a deep-seated fear among many immigrants. The US has been dubbed the graveyard of languages by some academics for pushing English and excluding other tongues. Currently about 55 million Americans speak a language besides English at home, but by the third generation, the home language tends to atrophy, according to various studies. American society supports a rhetoric of multiculturalism but not multilingualism, experts say.
Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer “language confusion,” which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language. Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish — or Mandarin — for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before.
Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information. And while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there aren’t many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child.
But there is more and more research to draw on, reaching back to infancy and even to the womb. As the relatively new science of bilingualism pushes back to the origins of speech and language, scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two.
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council 