This is from a parent at Lincoln High School in San Francisco.
Lincoln has long had Cantonese immersion students from Alice Fong Yu (K-8) and West Portal (K-5) feeding into it. Here are some of what they learned worked and didn’t work. It’s a useful bit of information as the newer (read: most of us) Mandarin immersion schools work our way on up to high school. They’re looking for feedback on what content  class would be for immersion students at high school?  We’d love feedback from programs that are already up to high school. What works and what doesn’t?

Some background:
1. 1997-1999: Lincoln’s Chinese immersion program used integrated science (Cantonese) as the content class for immersion students. It was very successful.

2. 2000: Lincoln used Algebra I as the content class and it didn’t work. The main reason was that not all students’ math level was the same. The teacher had to deal with math problem, as well as language problem.

3. Some parents did not want the core content class (math, science, social studies) to be taught in Chinese. This is an offshoot of Alice Fong Yu’s model: students only get Chinese in their Chinese language classes  after 7th grade. (one Cantonese and one Mandarin). But of course this model won’t work for Mandarin immersion middle school program since students will not learn Cantonese. It will not work for high school, either, although Lincoln is capable of doing that. (Lincolnhas a Chinese language art track for native speakers of Cantonese. Currently many immersion students choose that track, too.)

4. Current proposal at Lincoln: 9th grade: Geometry as the content class. Language class will be based on students’ proficiency level: they may choose the regular Chinese track or immersion track or native speaker track. 10th grade: students take AP Chinese only.

Back to school, plenty of change

Maillard middle school principal Andrew Graham welcomes back students Tuesday morning to the Coquitlam school, which was closed for a year for a $7-million seismic upgrade (see story, page 12). The students joined thousands of others for opening day and will be back in classes today. Among the visitors in School District 43 was B.C. Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid, who was on hand to welcome the first class of full-day kindergarten students at Walton elementary school.

JENNIFER GAUTHIER/THE TRI-CITY NEWS
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It’s back to school for 30,000 students in School District 43 but more than 1,000 kindergarten kids will simply be meeting their teachers and checking out their classrooms during welcome interviews set to take place this week.

On Tuesday, 20 kindergarten students experienced their first taste of school life under the glare of the media spotlight and got to sit cross-legged on the floor with B.C.’s education minister, Margaret MacDiarmid.

The minister was in the Tri-Cities to highlight the province’s $280-million commitment to implementing full-day kindergarten for all five-year-olds in B.C. as well as a $144.5-million investment in new classroom space for these students.

She visited Coquitlam’s Walton elementary school, which is also the site of B.C.’s first bilingual Mandarin program, and congratulated the district in meeting the demand for the popular language program.

“I think it’s a program that’s appropriate for B.C. We have such close ties [to Asia] with our education and it’s one of the most important languages to have,” MacDiarmid told The Tri-City News.

She said she wouldn’t be surprised if other school boards introduced Mandarin immersion, with the only issue being finding enough Mandarin-speaking teachers familiar with the B.C. kindergarten curriculum.

Although the province is rolling out full-day kindergarten for all students in 2010 and 2011, MacDiarmid said there are no plans to change the current curriculum for the longer day.

Read more here.

So I shelled out $75 for this dictionary and it arrived at my local bookstore today. AND THERE’S NO PINYIN IN THE ENGLISH SIDE!

It’s useless, or at least 50% useless! (the Mandarin-English side grudgingly gives pinyin for main words, but not for many compounds and examples)

So your kid says “Mama, how do you say ‘lion’ in Mandarin?” as she does her homework. You tell her to  go to this dictionary and look up lion in the English-Mandarin side and it tells her lion is 狮子.

Well, that was helpful. You child knows how to write it but not say it. So the two of you have to laboriously count the stroke order and look it up in the Mandarin-English side, only to have her say “Oh, it’s shirzi! I knew that, I just forgot.”

I simply don’t get the thinking behind doing an entire dictionary with the presumption that the only people using it are people who are already fluent readers of Chinese. Do they not think that other people might be learning Chinese? It’s maddening.

So don’t buy this dictionary unless you happen to have a fluent reader of Mandarin in your household. It’s just not worth the price given that it doesn’t provide pronunciation.

And if there’s something I’m missing about why one would want a dictionary that didn’t provide pronunciation, please enlighten me. (Sorry, I’m pretty peeved right now – why is it so hard to find a good English-Chinese, Chinese-English dictionary for English speakers?)

–Beth

From the Wall Street Journal

Five years, 60 editors and translators, 300,000 words, 370,000 translations: It all adds up to the largest single volume English-Chinese, Chinese-English dictionary ever put together, due to be published Sept. 9 by Oxford University Press.

For Julie Kleeman, one of the dictionary’s two chief editors, putting together the dictionary has been a long but ultimately satisfying slog. Having read every entry in the huge tome at least once, she’s confident it’s a departure from other such dictionaries on the market, both within China and elsewhere.

“It presents both English and Chinese in a much more modern, colloquial, conversational way,” she says, in part a result of using native speakers of both languages in the compilation process, the first time this has happened on an English-Chinese dictionary of this size.

Please click here to read more.

Fremont starts first Mandarin immersion kindergarten program

Lawerence Tran, 5, whispers something to his dad Thang Tran as he gets dropped off on the first day…

FREMONT — Children in teacher Orchid Wang’s kindergarten class didn’t say “bye-bye” to their parents, who crowded just outside the classroom door Wednesday morning, snapping photos of their little ones sitting at school desks for the first time.

With a little prodding from the teacher, they said “zia jian” as they waved goodbye to their moms and dads before Wang closed the door.

They were among thousands of students throughout the Fremont and New Haven school districts who started the school year Wednesday.

Moments after Wang’s class began, out came Pikachu, Hello Kitty, a dragon, and several other props — all geared toward teaching the basics of Mandarin Chinese.

If everything goes according to plan, these 28 students will be proficient in the world’s most spoken language by middle school.

Not surprisingly, nearly all of the 28 students in Fremont’s first Mandarin-immersion kindergarten class have at least one parent of Chinese descent, although English is the only language spoken in most of their homes.

Please click here to read more.

British Columbia has one of the largest Chinese-speaking populations in Canada. But Mandarin immersion programs are thin on the ground there, with one up and running and two starting next year. They’re all oversubscribed.  This is from the national paper, The Globe and Mail

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