Two excellent online dictionaries that save the day in many a Mandarin immersion home during homework hour.
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council
Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education
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by Nishi Gupta
KTVB.COM
Posted on August 27, 2010 at 6:04 PM
Updated yesterday at 6:28 PM
MERIDIAN — A school in Meridian may be the first of its kind in the state.
The Gateway School of Language and Culture will offer an intense Mandarin Chinese program to some of its students this year.
It’s predicted the language will be dominant in the business world of the future, and teachers hope to equip Idaho kids with the edge they need to succeed.
When you step into the Gateway School you suddenly feel like you’re in the Far East. Its classrooms and halls are covered wall-to-wall in an Asian theme.
And teachers are prepared to step it up a notch.
“They’re going to call me Li Lao Shi, which means Mr. Lee,” Are they going to learn that on the first day? Yes, yes,” said teacher Peng Li.
Peng Li is one of three teachers who will put students on the path to global enlightenment and education.
Studies show kids who learn a foreign language early have a better of chance of being fluent, and at Gateway, about 40 kids in kindergarten and first grade will be exposed to it in classrooms like Li’s.
They’ll be taught for half a day in English, the rest in Mandarin Chinese.
Teachers will follow the general Meridian curriculum, but the immersion program will add an additional Asian flare — and for good reason.
“People look at China to be the next strongest country to, shoulder to shoulder to America,”said Li.
“What’s the world going to look like 15-20 years from now when these kids are entering college, leaving college, entering the workforce? And it was really hard when you look at that crystal ball and try to look at what the world is going to look like to think that China isn’t going to be a major player and what an opportunity we can give to students right here in Meridian and Boise,” said Gateway Principal Craig Ayala-Marshall.
Ayala-Marshall says the district plans to add Mandarin Chinese courses in junior high and high schools as the kindergartners and first graders age.
The belief is the students who stick to the program will be ready to compete on an international stage.
“After 12-13 years in our school system, they should come out fully bilingual,” said Ayala-Marshall.
And fully fluent in Chinese culture.
Teacher Peng Li will make sure of that.
“I have this mission to just share the language, share the culture and just bring as much as I can,” said Li.
The Mandarin Chinese immersion program is only offered to kindergartners and first grade right now.
All of the other students in the school will learn the language for about an hour a week, and that’s something the school has done for a couple years.
If you want to sign your child up for this program, it is not too late. Call the school soon though, as classes start on Monday.
See the TV segment here.
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Like every Chinese child, Li Hanwei spent her schooldays memorising thousands of the intricate characters that make up the Chinese writing system.Yet aged just 21 and now a university student in Hong Kong, Li already finds that when she picks up a pen to write, the characters for words as simple as “embarrassed” have slipped from her mind.
“I can remember the shape, but I can?t remember the strokes that you need to write it,” she says. “It?s a bit of a problem.”
//Surveys indicate the phenomenon, dubbed “character amnesia”, is widespread across China, causing young Chinese to fear for the future of their ancient writing system.
Young Japanese people also report the problem, which is caused by the constant use of computers and mobile phones with alphabet-based input systems.
There is even a Chinese word for it: “tibiwangzi”, or “take pen, forget character”.
A poll commissioned by the China Youth Daily in April found that 83 percent of the 2,072 respondents admitted having problems writing characters.
As a result, Li says that she has become almost dependent on her phone.
“When I can?t remember, I will take out my cellphone and find it (the character) and then copy it down,” she says.
Zeng Ming, 22, from the southern Guangdong province, says: “I think it’s a young people’s problem, or at least a computer users’ problem.”
One notoriously forgettable character, Zeng says, is used in the word Tao Tie — a legendary Chinese monster that was so greedy it ate itself.
Still used as a byword for gluttony, the Tao Tie is one of many ancient Chinese concepts embedded in the language.
“It?s like you?re forgetting your culture,” Zeng says.
Character amnesia happens because most Chinese people use electronic input systems based on pinyin, which translates Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet.
The user enters each word using pinyin, and the device offers a menu of characters that match. So users must recognise the character, but they don’t need to be able to write it.
In Japan, where three writing systems are combined into one, mobiles and computers use the simpler hiragana and katakana scripts for inputting — meaning users may forget the kanji, a third strand of Japanese writing similar to Chinese characters.
“We rely too much on the conversion function on our phones and PCs,” said Ayumi Kawamoto, 23, shopping in Tokyo’s upscale Ginza district.
“I’ve mostly forgotten characters I learned in middle and high school and I tend to forget the characters I only occasionally use.”
Tokyo student Maya Kato, 22, said: “I hardly hand-write anymore, which is the main reason why I have forgotten so many characters.
“It is frustrating because I always almost remember the character, and lose it at the last minute. I forget if there was an extra line, or where the dot is supposed to go.”
Character amnesia matters because memorisation is so crucial to character-based written languages, says Siok Wai Ting, assistant professor of linguistics at Hong Kong University. Forgetting how to write could eventually affect reading ability.
“There is no way we can learn the writing systematically because the writing itself is not systematic — we have to memorise, we have to rote learn,” she says.
Read more here.
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San Mateo school’s Mandarin program gets $1.4 million boost
By Neil Gonzales
San Mateo County TimesPosted: 08/26/2010 10:11:18 PM PDTUpdated: 08/26/2010 10:49:38 PM PDT//// 0){
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// ]]>SAN MATEO — A federal grant of $1.4 million will transform the San Mateo-Foster City School District’s Mandarin-immersion effort at College Park Elementary into an elite foreign-language learning program, officials said.College Park, which has featured Mandarin for more than three years, received the funding from the federal Foreign Language Assistance Program.
“At a time when financing for schools is of concern, a grant like this is great support for our specialized programs,” district Assistant Superintendent Joan Rosas said Thursday.
Currently, College Park teaches Mandarin in preschool to third grade. The grant will help expand that instruction into the fourth and fifth grades and to Bayside STEM Academy middle school in the next few years, College Park Principal Diana Hallock said.
Bayside will have a Chinese language-arts class and a social-studies course taught in Mandarin, Hallock said.
Although the grant targets students in kindergarten to fifth grade and beyond, she said, preschool teachers will participate in training for the expanded Mandarin program.
The money will bring in a full-time specialist to translate information into Mandarin as well as create material for teachers to use in their lessons, she said.
“Having an expert to go to or to do research is extremely helpful,” she said.
read more here.
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KQED TOWN HALL MEETING, SAN FRANCISCO
Free film screening of SPEAKING IN TONGUES with panel discussion
Thursday, September 2, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
KQED, 2601 Mariposa Street, San Francisco
Panelists include:
Kevin Chávez
Dual Immersion / Special Education Supervisor
Hydra Mendoza
School Board Member and Mayor Newsom’s Education Advisor
Lissa Kim
Korean Dual Immersion Teacher
Dr. Ling-chi Wang
Co-Founder of the first Chinese Immersion program in the U.S. and
Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
Marcia Jarmel & Ken Schneider
Filmmakers, Speaking in Tongues
Seating is limited. Please RSVP to: http://speakingintongues.eventbrite.com/
Speaking in Tongues is an hour-long PBS documentary airing in September on KQED and across the country. It follows four diverse San Francisco immersion school students and their parents on their path to become bilingual. Winner of the Audience Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
SPEAKING IN TONGUES — 4 kids, 4 languages, 1 city, 1 world
Watch the trailer: http://www.speakingintonguesfilm.info
AUDIENCE AWARD for BEST DOCUMENTARY
San Francisco International Film Festival
COMING TO PBS FALL 2010PATCHWORKS FILMS
Marcia Jarmel & Ken Schneider, Filmmakers
415.387.5912 -
The San Francisco Mandarin Immersion Parents Council met yesterday evening to discuss the district’s draft middle school plan and what changes, if any, the group might like to propose to parents and the district leadership. Here are my notes from that discussion…
Summary
The Jose Ortega parents are generally satisfied with the current middle school plan, which sends their children to Aptos Middle School, while the Starr King community has more mixed feelings about the plan, which sends their children to Horace Mann Middle School. Some portion of the Mandarin immersion parent community at Jose Ortega might join Starr King MI parents in asking to combine the programs at a single school, but probably only if that proposal targets Aptos.
The Starr King parents are therefore considering the following courses of action…
- Embrace the selection of Horace Mann and work with the other feeder schools (Buena Vista, Chavez, and Webster)
- Accept the selection of Horace Mann and petition the district for possible changes to the plan
- Develop a consensus among the entire Starr King community (both MI, Gen-Ed, and Spanish biliteracy), that Aptos is a better choice, then petition the district to make this their middle school
They have assigned action items to different parents to do the following…
- Visit Horace Mann next week
- Reach out to parent groups at Buena Vista, Chavez, and Webster
- Visit or perform research on Aptos
- Survey their parent community to understand their reactions to these different possible options
Given these facts, the middle school issue has become a question primarily for Starr King. The MIPC has no plans to meet again on this topic and the MIPC middle school committee is essentially inactive. However the MIPC will continue to meet on other topics such as Mandarin language materials, curriculum, etc.
Conversation with Orla O’Keefe
Starr King Parent and MIPC president Beth Weise met with Special Assistant to the Superintendent on Student Assignment, Orla O’Keefe. Ms. O’Keefe is the person with overall responsibility for the new plan. Here is what Beth learned…
Parent communities wishing to suggest a change to their own middle school assignment should understand the high-level goals that are driving the new plan. One of the most important goals is to keep school communities together as the children move from elementary school to middle school. This means that the district is unlikely to create a system that assigns students to a middle school based on participation in a program such as Mandarin immersion. Ms O’Keefe said, “By splitting schools that have immersion and GE program, you diminish the opportunity to have a integrated learning opportunity”.
Another goal is to make elementary schools feed into middle schools that are nearby. While there are exceptions to this, the district generally avoids assigning children to a middle school that is far from their elementary school.
Also, the district wants to locate Mandarin immersion programs in all four quadrants of the city. This is an equity issue because the goal is to make Mandarin available and nearby for every community.
Finally Ms. O’Keefe did acknowledge that it is a challenge to achieve all the goals listed above and create a viable Mandarin immersion program at a school like Horace Mann. The question of attrition and lack of participation is one that does concern her.
Starr King Parent Feedback
Every parent in attendance had the chance to share their feelings. Here are some of the common themes…
Positives of Horace Mann and the SFUSD plan
- This is more of a neighborhood model
- Principal Mark Sanchez is a strong school leader
- The school will have a large “language immersion” community because Buena Vista and Webster have Spanish immersion programs
- It will be more like a true “immersion school”
- Mann will have a much larger budget-per-student than any other school in the district
- Horace Mann is well served by public transit (BART, multiple Muni lines, etc)
- Excited about the mix of schools feeding into Mann (Buena Vista, Webster, Chavez)
Negatives of Horace Mann and the SFUSD plan
- There is a significant risk of attrition from the program because families will perceive Horace Mann as a less desirable middle school
- We won’t have strength in numbers, and combining our children at one school would have made a stronger Mandarin immersion experience for our middle school children
- The school will not be located where the Chinese population primarily lives
Jose Ortega Survey
During the discussion, I presented the data from a survey I ran of Jose Ortega parents. Here is a very brief summary…
- 43 parents participated, including 32 from the Mandarin program and 11 from the general education program
- A large majority of parents are satisfied with Aptos as our middle school
- Those that aren’t satisfied nearly all added comments that said they wanted a “better” school and mentioned schools like Hoover, Giannini, Presidio, or private school
- Half the parents clearly said that they want to “keep our Jose Ortega community together” as we move to middle school, and half said that they wanted to choose the best program for their child
- When asked what other middle schools they considered acceptable, the parents listed Aptos, Hoover, Giannini, James Lick, and Presidio. A smaller number also listed Roosevelt and James Denman. The remaining middle schools in the district, including Horace Mann, were listed as “unacceptable” by a majority of respondents.
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Nothing on Mandarin here, but I know many parents have asked about hiring Mandarin-speaking nannies and babysitters so that their kids are bilingual. It certainly works – the Russian aristocracy always hired French-speaking nannies so that their children grew up speaking French perfectly.
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The New York Times
By JENNY ANDERSON
Published: August 18, 2010
When Maureen Mazumder enrolled her daughter, Sabrina, in a Spanish singalong class a year ago, she hoped it would be the first step in helping her learn a second language. But the class did not seem to do the trick, so Ms. Mazumder decided to hire a baby sitter, one who would not only care for her daughter but also speak to her exclusively in Spanish.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Elas Tarazona was hired to speak in Spanish with Nir Liberboim’s son WIlliam.
“It was a must that she speak Spanish,” said Ms. Mazumder, who said neither she nor her husband was fluent in the language. “We feel so strongly that our daughter hear another language.”
Ms. Mazumder, whose daughter is nearly 3, has company. Although a majority of parents seeking caretakers for their children still seek ones who will speak to their children in English, popular parenting blogs and Web sites indicate that a noticeable number of New York City parents are looking for baby sitters and nannies to help their children learn a second language, one they may not speak themselves.
Read more here.
Like every Chinese child, 
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council 