[From the Latin American Herald Tribune]

Documentary Explores Importance of Bilingualism in U.S.

By Ivan Mejia

LOS ANGELES – The documentary “Speaking in Tongues” explores the importance for U.S. students in the 21st century of learning to speak other languages in public school immersion programs.

“‘Speaking in Tongues’ is a documentary about children who attend classes in schools that teach in two languages,” filmmaker Ken Schneider tells Efe.

“The movie is all about the value of being bilingual in the United States, a country that doesn’t promote people learning to speak and write well in other languages in the public educational system,” he said.

The 60-minute film, produced by PatchWorks Films, was produced in 2006 and 2007 in San Francisco public schools that have special immersion programs in two languages.

The documentary premiered in 2009 and received the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

It has been screened in schools and movie theaters in California, and next Sept. 30 it will be seen nationwide on PBS television.

“Even though 31 states have passed laws ruling that students learn only English, the San Francisco school board in 2006 approved a resolution allowing the public school system to offer bilingual education, to which some people are opposed,” Schneider said.

The characters whose progress in learning the movie producers followed for two years are…

Jason Patiño, a Mexican-American student taking the immersion course in Spanish at Buena Vista Alternative Elementary School.

Durrell Laury, an African-American boy whose mother entered him in Mandarin Chinese immersion classes at the Starr King School, because that way he will have good employment opportunities in the future.

Kelly Wong, who is learning Chinese in the Alice Fong Yu Alternative School to be able to converse with her grandma in China.

Read more here.

It will be interesting to track what happens in Colorado Springs. I’ve been curious to know whether the immersion preschools come first, and create demand for immersion schools, or whether they can exist independently. Does anyone know of places where it’s gone one way or the other?

Here are two immersion preschools, one in Seattle, on in Colorado Springs. Seattle has an immersion K-12 program in place but I don’t believe there’s anything in Colorado Springs.

Seattle:Polly-Glot’s lively language immersion classes integrates play, music, movement,and art to engage children and connect the foreign sounds and words to everyday items and activities. Quarterly themes are brought to life through music, stories,and games that are often familiar to parents and easy to repeat in the home.Vocabulary is provided so parents can reinforce the language outside of the class, whether or not the parent has previous language experience or fluency.
Please bring $8 material fee payable to the instructor at the first day of class;
exact change is appreciated. We are currently offering Spanish,French, and Mandarin. Please call 206-684-4753 for exact dates and times. Classes will begin the week of 9/13 – 11/15
Ages: 1 – 5
Fee:$130.00

Colorado Springs:

Read more: Local, Education, Community, Yak Academy, Foreign Language, French, Spanish, Mandarin

COLO. SPRINGS, CO — A new foreign language program is opening in Colorado Springs.

It’s aimed at young students – ages one to ten – and immerses them in French, Spanish and Mandarin.

It’s a hundred percent immersion, so when the kids walk in the door its just the target language for that entire time,” owner/director Emily Hammond said.  “Everything we do is play-based so it’s through games and songs, we even do a little snack time which is the best time to get language out of kids because they’re so eager to get that cheerio or goldfish!”

Most of the instructors are native speakers, and they say kids have a much easier time picking up new languages than adults.

“To us adults, we feel we’re already born with a language,” Mandarin instructor Jing Jing Wang said.  “It’s difficult for us to adampt to another language.  But for kids there’s no difference, they can learn two or more languages and they won’t confuse them.  At the beginning, they may be a little confused, they may say one sentence in two different languages, but eventually they’ll be able to distinguish between the two.”

The class sizes are small – eight students or less.  It’s something that  Hammond has been working on for years, and she says she’s received a lot of support from area parents.

“When we first got the word out, I got tons of calls from parents, saying they’ve been waiting for a Spanish preschool to open up, they’ve been waiting for Mandarin classes.” Hammond said.  “For children of this age, there’s really nothing you can get in the area for Mandarin, Spanish or French, so I definitely feel there’s a need being met now in Colorado.”

“I feel very relaxed working with kids, I have lots of fun and I just love it,” Wang said.

It’s a plus for kids from different countries, with foreign-born parents, or who are just looking for an advantage in a competitive workplace.

“Today the economy is going increasingly global, so it’s a great thing that children can learn two languages or more,” Wang said.   Her daughter Haleigh is just four years old but already speaks multiple languages.  “We’ve just completed more than twenty hours of training and all the instructors work really well together.  We’re really looking forward to teaching our first lesson!

“It can be a little overwhelming at first, because you see they’re being introduced to this whole new language,” Hammond said.  But these kids learn so quickly, they love to learn and they love their instructors.  Plus, things like this increase brain development, improves test scores and is great for self-esteem.  When the kids work at answering a question and answer it correctly, they kind of perk up, they’re so proud of themselves for knowing this additional knowledge.”

There are preschool classes for younger students and after-school sessions for older ones.  You can get more information at www.yakacademy.com

By Elizabeth Weise, MIPC

The Denver Language School has cojones. There’s just no other way to put it. On August 12 they started an entirely new school with 240 students, a little more than half in Spanish immersion and a little less than half in Mandarin immersion.

And no English during the school day.

None. Nada. Mei you.

Wow. Now that’s immersion.

To be fair, executive director Brian Weber explains that they have English language arts available in their afterschool program for parents who want it, or for children whose teachers deem it necessary. But the school doesn’t plan to introduce English classes during the school day until third grade.

DLS was approved as a charter school by the Denver Public School District in June of 2009 and opened its doors on Aug. 12, 2010. Unlike Princeton, NJ, which shot down a Mandarin charter this year “Denver is one of the most open districts in the country” to charters, says Weber.

The school opened with three Spanish immersion Kindergartens and one 1^st/2^nd grade split class, and two Mandarin immersion Kindergartens and a 1^st/2^nd grade split, for a total of four Spanish and three Mandarin classrooms. There are on average 26 students per class.

The school day runs from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm. Classes include math, science, language arts, social studies and art, all taught in either Spanish or Mandarin. Physical education and a theater class are taught in English.

“If there’s a need for English, it’s done in the hallway or some other place,” says Weber.

In the afterschool program, from 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm, just getting underway now, students have time for homework or language support, then enrichment. The cost is $5 a day, unless a student’s teacher feels they need the extra time, in which case it’s free.

The school looked a research about immersion and saw that students typically catch up in English class by 5^th or 6^th grade, and so made the decision to focus on the target languages in the beginning years.

“We’ve been very clear when they sign up for this about what this model entails,” says Weber. After all, the children are exposed to English at home and everywhere else. By offering optional English in the afterschool program “we felt we could maintain the integrity of our program.”

Most immersion schools begin at 90% instruction in the target language and 10% in English, moving to closer to 50/50 by 4^th grade. Some begin at 50/50. Denver’s program will provide its students with what is perhaps the most rigorous public language program available in the United States. UPDATE: Actually, Yinghua Academy in St. Paul, Minn, also does no English in the first two grades.

The program teaches using simplified characters, though recognition of some traditional characters is also taught, says deputy director Jian Lin. For textbooks they’re using Land Bridge for Early Learners from HanBan. Teachers come from both Taiwan and China. In Mandarin the classes also have teaching assistants through the HanBan program out of China.

The school opened as K – 2 in part because state law dictates that Kindergarten classes only get half funding. “It’s very difficult to open K-1, because you don’t’ get the funding,” says Weber.

The school is run by a team that includes Lin, Janine Erickson, who heads the Spanish immersion portion of the school (and was also immediate past president of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) and Weber.

It was begun with financial support from Denver’s Stapleton Foundation, which works on education and social issues. Weber’s position is funded by the foundation, which allowed him to spend the past two years working to create the program.

While opening a two-language, seven classroom, 240-student school might seem daunting, the real issue was dealing with the students it couldn’t accommodate, says Weber. “We had 480 applicants for 225 slots,” he says. Students were chosen by random lottery.  The only other public immersion program nearby is the Global Village Academy in Aurora, 20 minutes away, which is now in its fourth year.

The school’s goal is to serve a student population with at least 40% receiving free and reduced price lunches. This year they’re at between 20 to 25%, Weber says. The school also provides a bus to bring students in from low income neighborhoods.

Originally the plan was to have two Mandarin and two Spanish Kindergartens but “along about December the enrollment was so high for Spanish kids that we had 125 kids for 50 slots, so we added a third Kindergarten class,” says Weber.

The Denver school district is very open to teaching other languages, and District Superintendent Tom Boasberg spent eight years himself teaching in China and is a fluent Mandarin speaker.

The school is currently located in a school district building, which staff estimate will work for four to five years and then “we’ll have to built or renovate,” says Weber. “It’s going to cost around $10 million.”

While they’re already getting calls about exporting their charter model to other schools, that won’t happen for years he says. “What we’re trying to do is really stay focused on our fundamental mission for the next three years of doing this right. I know from experience that trying to expand to charter management too quickly doesn’t work, it takes a while to do it right.”

Being this kind of start up requires a great deal of flexibility on all sides, says Weber. “It’s certainly not a bed of roses. It’s like building a house while you’re trying to live in it. The watchword here is patience and adjustment,” he says.

They’re trying to see what works and change what doesn’t no the fly. “Sometimes that can be frustrating for parents, because as much as they intellectually understand that it’s new, emotionally for their kids they want it to be perfect.”

But, he says, it’s a good lesson for everyone: “Take a deep breath, it’s going to be okay. This is Kindergarten.

You can see their website here.

The first meeting of the MIPC for the 2010-2011 school year went very well indeed. It began with a brisk sale of MIPC character placemats, t-shirts and hoodies created by JOES parent Elizabeth Olson (all available on our website as well.)

Jose Ortega Elementary hosted our meeting – special thanks to principal JoLynn Washington who stayed until 7:30 so she could lock the doors behind us.

We’ve got four committees forming for this year that need participants –

Books: Help find our kids fun, enticing books in Chinese! This committee will work with publishers, the library, some universities and talk to other Chinese immersion schools to come up with annotated lists of books for each grade. Let’s get our kids reading!

Banquet: We’re planning a spring Chinese banquet to honor our teachers for all they do to help our children learn Mandarin. It will be held at a local restaurant. If you like food, event planning or just have a line on a great banquet restaurant, this is the committee for you.

China: Our first Mandarin immersion students graduate from 5th grade in the spring of 2012. We’re hoping that eventually we can start fund raising in Kindergarten so that all 5th graders (or potentially 8th graders) can take a class trip to China. But for our first couple of years, we’re thinking more that families that want to can create a stand-alone trip with a strong educational component that’s open to all who chose to participate. This is the committee for those who know China, know travel or just want to make sure there’s a great opportunity for our kids to go somewhere where everyone speaks Mandarin.

and finally,

Middle School: Starr King parent Katie Olson, who’s ably and calmly lead the MIPC Middle School committee during this period of massive change in our middle school plans, gave a great overview of where things currently stand. She urged all parents to make their wishes known to the School Board (emails are on both schools’ lists) and to stay tuned for Sept. 13, when District staff will make their revised presentation to the School Board.

Finally, thanks to Kellyn, who coordinated the meeting at JOES, Scott who created the Powerpoint that kept things short and sweet, and Carrie for all the really delicious plums!