Our Mandarin Immersion Programs: How are they Organized?
By Elizabeth Weise
Wendy Cheong is the Mandarin curriculum coordinator for the San Francisco Unified School District. A classroom teacher for 20 years, she was born and raised in Taiwan before moving to the United States in middle school. Together with the Mandarin teachers at Starr King and Jose Ortega she is constructing the District’s Mandarin immersion curriculum.
Cheong is also a professional development coach for our Mandarin teachers (most of whom are fairly new to teaching) and creating assessment tools for teachers and students. She spoke with about 50 parents at the April 30, 2009 Mandarin Immersion Parent Council meeting at Jose Ortega.
Introduction
Any language immersion program, but Mandarin especially, is a journey that needs to last for between 7 and 9 years for students to get all the possible benefit from the program, she told parents.
“All the research shows that immersion is a long-term process. Students are somewhat behind in English at the beginning, but by 5th and 6th grade not only catch up but surpass their English-only peers. So parents should realize that they’re making a long-term commitment to immersion. It’s not something that you start with to check out and then expect that you can hop out in 3rd grade and your child will have 3rd grade competency in both English and Mandarin.”
Program Goals
The end goal of our programs is that by the end of 5th grade, Mandarin immersion (MI) students should be have social and academic competency in Mandarin.
Social competency means the ability to speak comfortably, at normal speed, with native speakers about everyday topics such as shopping, family, asking direction, talking about playing and hobbies. Students should be fluent enough to understand and respond to 70 to 80% of what a Mandarin speaker says to them.
For Academic competency, it means that MI students should be able to read at between a 3.5 to 4th grade level in Chinese, while reaching a 5th grade reading level in English.
The difference, Cheong explained, is because students who grow up in Chinese speaking countries are surrounded by characters and people reading characters, so they gain a broader exposure to them than students growing up in English-speaking households in an English-speaking city. They should be able to write short paragraphs on known topics that use vocabulary they’re familiar with, but not get the grammar 100% correct all the time.
In terms of their ability so use Mandarin, students in our programs are not only learning to speak everyday Mandarin, but also to use more complex academic Mandarin, or ‘book language,’ because they also study math, social studies and art in Mandarin.
That is the definition of the difference between immersion and typical foreign language instruction, says Cheong. Our students don’t just learn Mandarin, they are also learning other subjects in Mandarin.
Overall, that will result in students, upon finishing 5th grade, being at an ‘intermediate/high’ level of Chinese as defined by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). Novice is considering an incoming Kindergartener with no previous Chinese experience.
Cheong reminded parents that according to ACTFL, it takes three times as long for English speakers to learn Chinese than it does to learn a Romance language such as Spanish or French. Other languages in the same difficulty range as Chinese include Japanese and Arabic.
In English, she says, it takes about half a year to master ‘social language,’ the ability to hang out on the playground. But mastering formal, school English takes between five to seven years. And mastering sophisticated English, at the level of a good college student, takes many more years. So it’s important to remember that fluency isn’t exactly the same thing as full language competence. Many of us are fluent English speakers, but not all of us could hold a discussion at the level of a college professor.
How many Characters?
How many Chinese characters students know is commonly given as a benchmark in learning Chinese, so parents asked how many characters our students could be expected to be able to read at the end of 5th grade.
By that time they will have learned to read and write about 500 characters, but will be able to read and recognize a total of between 800 to 1,000 depending on the student’s level, Cheong says.
That compared to the between 1,000 to 1,500 that is considered necessary to read an adult newspaper, she says. To be a fully literate adult, somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 characters are considered necessary, and for higher level studies it can go as high as 6,000.
This is monitored in part by the Chinese Language Arts Report Cards that students are given four times a year
Curriculum
As much as they might wish there to be, there’s no one single set of textbooks the District can by that taken together would teacher our students everything the District wants them to learn in Mandarin, says Cheong
For that reason, she and the teachers use a mixture of two textbook series and separate worksheets. The textbook series are:
- My First Chinese Readers (from Better Chinese)
- Chinese Treasure Chest
My First Chinese Readers is used for social language and grammar. Chinese Treasure Chest contain contain many well-known Chinese rhymes, tongue twisters, fables and poetry. And then there are the chants. Cheong explained that where English-speaking children might learn Mother Goose rhymes, Chinese children grow up with a large number of ‘er ge’ or chants, which have rhythm but don’t necessarily rhyme.
In addition, teachers use a variety of worksheet that they themselves create, or worksheets used in the West Portal Cantonese immersion program which they translate into Mandarin and simplified characters. Cheong also talks with Alice Fong Yu teachers about their curriculum to determine if it can be modified to suit our needs.
The curriculum used in MI is theme-based, so students are working with the same sets of vocabulary and can build upon it across both their text books and their worksheets.
The take-home message for parents is that there is no one, perfect Mandarin immersion curriculum that can just be bought off the shelf, says Cheong. “You can’t just transplant it, you have to create it.”
Learning issues
Children who have learning difficulties in English are also likely to have learning difficulties in Chinese, or in any second language they acquire, says Cheong.
For that reason, doing learning assessments in English is crucial. That’s because students become more competent reading English faster than they will in Chinese, so learning difficulties will show up first in English.
Those will probably become apparent in English in Kindergarten or 1st grade, but won’t be in Chinese until the end of 1st grade or the beginning of 2nd, Cheong says.
Literacy in English (or whatever language is spoken at home) is a big support in literacy in a second language, she says. “the better your skills in your mother tongue, the better it transfers.”
For that reason, literacy specialists (who help students who are struggling with reading) won’t be that useful for the Mandarin portion of the program until 2nd grade, although they’re very important in English earlier on. So Cheong suggests that literacy specialists (we currently have one for 2009 but it is only funded until the end of this school year) only work with 1st and 2nd graders. It’s unclear if we’ll have a literacy specialist in Mandarin for 2009-2010 so this may be moot. However, she did say that “teachers are watching for trouble areas” and are aware of the issues.
If it becomes clear that literacy in Mandarin is an issue, it might be an area that parents should discuss with their principals and with Margaret Peterson, the District’s World Languages Coordinator, and possibly look for additional funding to pay for such support.
Vocabulary
Just as in English, spoken language is often different from ‘book language’ and to be educated, students have to know both. While it’s enough to know ‘rock’ to talk on the playground, in the science lesson on geology terms such as ‘rock,’ ‘stone,’ ‘mineral,’ and ‘boulder’ might be used.
Cheong has compiled a list of vocabulary that students should learn as they work their way up through the grades. In Kindergarten it might just be rock, but then in second they might add ‘stone’ and in 4th ‘mineral.’
Doing that kind of building of vocabulary is crucial so that students are capable of studying more sophisticated material as they move up through the grades. “To insure that they can continue in math in 6th grade, they have to start now,” she says.
That means a lot of work for the teachers, especially the leading-edge class at Starr King, because students have to be taught the same core topic material their peers in General Education are learning, only it’s got to be translated into Mandarin.
That means using the Everyday Math series and the Boss Kit Science (Inquiry Model) but translating the terms and the worksheets into Mandarin.
“We have all the key vocabulary translated into Mandarin and cross-checked across grade levels. It’s that kind of work that will make it consistent across both schools,” Cheong says.
For example, there is a 5th grade science test that all district students must take, in English. Our students will have learned all the same material, but they will know it in English. Exactly how this is going to be dealt with is something that Cheong, the teachers and the District are still wrestling with.
“This is one of the trouble spots we’re working out,” she says.
The teachers are evaluating students each year to make sure that they’re on track, and to insure that all first graders in all three MI classrooms have pretty much the same vocabulary, so that when they graduate 5th grade and are ready to move to middle school, are students will all be able to enter Mandarin middle school classes with the same vocabulary.
That’s been a problem with some of the Spanish immersion schools, the programs are not well ‘articulated’ to use District jargon. That means that students don’t necessarily learn the same vocabulary from school to school, so when they end up in middle school or high school it’s difficult for Spanish immersion students from different schools to be in the same classrooms because they don’t start with the same vocabulary.
One or two-way?
Starr King and Jose Ortega were created as two-way immersion programs, presuming that they would have half native English speakers and half native Mandarin speakers. However because of the smaller number of Mandarin-speaking students who have applied, our programs are effectively one-way.
That’s not a problem because “you have smart teachers who teach in whatever way works with the students. Our teaching strategies reflect one-way immersion,” says Cheong.
In the SFUSD, all the Spanish programs are constructed that way. However Alice Fong Yu, a K-8 Cantonese immersion program, is one-way and requires that all incoming students be fluent in English. West Portal, the District’s K-5 Cantonese immersion program is two-way.
The District is evaluating our programs and may eventually decide to call them one-way because that’s what they are, or to wait to see if more Mandarin speakers begin to enroll. Either way, it won’t affect the way our students are taught.
How much Mandarin? How much English?
Currently, the Mandarin Immersion programs are 80% Mandarin and 20% English in Kindergarten and 1st grade, moving to 70/30 in 2nd grade, says Cheong. She, the district, the teachers and the principals are currently in the process of evaluating whether 3rd grade should stay at 70/30 or drop down to 60/40 or even 50/50 — or perhaps be increased back to 80/20.
Juggling how much Mandarin time is difficult, especially since the students must fit in other programs such as art, music and physical education. Cheong says she’s recommending that third grade stay at 70/30 for now, but that the decision must be made with input from teachers, principals and parents and taking into account individual school variables. “We want to do whatever is the best instructional model to achieve the goal” of fluency, she says.
Kindergarten through third grade is “the foundation” for Mandarin for our students. In 4th and 5th grade there is a jump in English instruction but it’s not a conflict because “they’re grounded in the basics” by then, she says. The first few years are one step at a time, but by the end of 3rd grade, when the students really have Mandarin down, they can start making “geometric progression” in their understanding and don’t need as much time in Mandarin.
Parents noted that other schools do this differently. For example, the nation’s oldest Mandarin immersion K-8 school, San Francisco’s private Chinese American International School, uses a 50/50 model because of concern that children weren’t doing as well in English.
However parents in the public Mandarin programs seemed to feel strongly (at least based on those at the meeting and speaking up on electronic discussions) that English is something children will get at home and in their environment, while Mandarin is something they can only get at school, so the more the better.
Final thoughts
Overall, Cheong said that we must understand that the Mandarin immersion program is a living, breathing, growing entity that will change as it matures. “We have to see how this first bunch of graduates does,” she told parents.
Which isn’t to say they’re total guinea pigs, but it is a work in progress and no other curriculum can be imported 100% and expected to work perfectly for us.
Parents can see how their children are doing by carefully reading the Chinese Language Arts Report Cards that students are given four times a year, which follows exactly the assessment goals that Cheong and the teachers have established for students at each current grade level.
