Sept. 28, 2018

From The Juneau Empire

• By Ben Hohenstatt
• Monday, January 7, 2019

By February, Juneau could have a childcare program entirely in Lingít.

Haa Yoo X’atángi Kúdi is Central Council of Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska’s new “language nest,” an immersive program intended to help revitalize the Tlingit language of Lingít.

After four years of development, the program is close to getting off the ground, with the goal of immersing Juneau students between the ages of 3 and 5 in the Tlingit language.

“We’re absolutely excited,” said Tlingit & Haida President Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson. “Every day as time goes by we lose more fluent first speakers.”

The Endangered Languages Project estimates there are about 200 fluent speakers of Lingít worldwide. The Alaska Native Language Center similarly puts that figure at 175 speakers.

Please read more here.

New Indigenous immersion program launching to teach kindergartners Kwak’wala

A new language immersion program is coming to a Vancouver Island elementary school — and no, it’s not the typical Spanish or Mandarin language programs. It’s Kwak’wala.

School District 72 recently gave the green light for the new pilot project in the Kwak’wala language and culture at Ripple Rock Elementary in Campbell River.

Starting in September, kindergarten students will be immersed in the Indigenous language, which is spoken in parts of coastal B.C. including Vancouver Island.

Please read more here.

 

Yiddish immersion Kindergarten may come to New York City

From The Forward

Three generations ago, before the Holocaust decimated European Jewry, tens of thousands of students studied at more than a thousand secular Yiddish elementary schools dotted across Eastern Europe.

Today, there is only one secular Yiddish school in the world, and it’s south Australia.

Next year, that could change, and in a dramatic way: Secular Yiddish education might be coming to a New York City public school.

A member of the New York City Council, Mark Levine, is proposing the creation of a dual-language Yiddish-English program in a New York City public school starting in the fall of 2020. The students would spend half of their day learning in English, and half learning in Yiddish.

Read more: https://forward.com/news/national/422512/yiddish-kindergarten-may-be-coming-to-a-new-york-city-public-school/

Please read more here.

How Hawaiian Came Back From the Dead

A legacy of colonialism nearly wiped out the language and its culture. These immersion schools weren’t having it.

HILO, Hawai‘i—When Herring Kekaulike Kalua was a child growing up on Hawai‘i’s Big Island, his parents spoke mostly in their native language, ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i. English had long been the official language of government in the islands, mandated in schools and other public spaces. But Kalua’s family favored the soft vowels of Hawaiian, rejecting the harder consonants of English while they fished, hunted, and grew taro, customs their ancestors had passed down for generations.

Please read more here.

Navajo Nation School Focuses on Language Revitalization

Diné Bi’ Olta’ immerses Navajo Nation youth in Diné language and culture

From Indian Country Today

 

“Béédaałniih: Diné bizaad bídahwiil’aah. Táadoo biligáana k’ehjí yádaalłti’í. Ahéhee’.” These are the first words that visitors see on a sign at the entrance of Tsé Hootsooí Diné Bi’ Olta’, an elementary immersion school that teaches the Navajo language to its 133 students on the capital of the Navajo Nation.

In English, the sign means, “Remember: We are learning in Diné. Please leave your English outside. Thank you.”

Visitors coming to the school also see trophies. Lots of them. Two full trophy displays line the halls near the entrance and even more trophies sit on top of bookshelves in the library, or naaltsoos bá hooghan, as students and teachers call it.

Please read more here.

From Quartz

By Abdi Latif Dahir January 8, 2019

Kenya will teach Mandarin in classrooms  in a bid to improve job competitiveness and facilitate better trade and connection with China.

The country’s curriculum development institute (KICD) has said the design and scope of the mandarin syllabus have been completed and will be rolled in out in 2020. Primary school pupils from grade four (aged 10) and onwards will be able to take the course, the head of the agency Julius Jwan told Xinhua news agency. Jwan said the language is being introduced given Mandarin’s growing global rise, and the deepening political and economic connections between Kenya and China.

“The place of China in the world economy has also grown to be so strong that Kenya stands to benefit if its citizens can understand Mandarin,” Jwan noted. Kenya follows in the footsteps of South Africawhich began teaching the language in schools in 2014 and Uganda which is planning mandatory Mandarin lessons for high school students.

Please read more here.

From Edutopia

ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS

The Dual Immersion Solution

Instead of seeing English language learners as a costly challenge, districts are increasingly recognizing the assets they bring to their schools.

From Edutopia.org

By Conor P. Williams

November 16, 2018

 

The Foreigners are in 709 is the book I suspect most of us would write if we had the gumption to just up sticks and move to China with our kids. Not a historical treatise, not a novel, not a deeply-researched analysis. Just the daily issues that come up when you relocate to China, especially when you don’t do it as part of a hefty ex-pat corporate package.

It’s what Hope Solomon Young, her husband and their two daughters did in for a year beginning in May of 2012. They were lucky enough to have mobile jobs, which allowed them to relocate for a year, and they took advantage of it.

The book is a rewrite of a blog that Hope kept during their time in China, so it’s got a day to day feel to it that gives a sense of the ups, downs (and sideways) of living in a foreign country, one where you don’t speak the language. It reads like a series of emails from a friend who’s over there rather than a research project, which is actually kinda fun.

Both girls were adopted from China and the Youngs took seriously the form they signed saying they would teach their children about their Chinese heritage. Their girls were in school at EE Waddell Language Academy in the Chinese immersion program, so they have been going to school in Mandarin since kindergarten.

The family moved to Beijing, in a grungy apartment in a highly unfashionable neighborhood where they never saw other Westerners. They also signed their girls up for a local public school. In fact, if there’s one ding I’d give this book it’s that I’d like to hear a lot more about what life was like for the girls at school, what they learned, how well they did and whether it was difficult to reenter an American school. However I realize that most of her readers are interested in the China part, not the language immersion part.

They had a lot of mishaps, none major, and a fair number of adventures. Especially their every-three-months visa runs to leave the country so they could come back in and renew their tourist visas.

I expect some of the things Hope writes about are different enough now that the book can’t be a roadmap for anyone thinking of doing the same. That said, it’s an honest look at what it’s like to live in China as a non-Chinese speaker and someone who’s not deeply steeped in the culture. If you’ve ever dreamed of doing something like this, I highly recommend it.

It’s available on Amazon here as a paperback.

 

 

 

 

 

New Study Examines Costs of Dual Language Immersion Programs

From the New America Foundation

By Ingrid T. Colón

Sept. 28, 2018

A hard question to answer, because the answer is different for every person, and in fact each person probably has several answers. The essay below is by a young Chinese-American woman who’s now living in China. It touches on some important points about our sometimes unthinking presumption that if a young person is fluent in both English and Chinese, the world will be their oyster. Not necessarily, and less so as more overseas Chinese return to China, fluent in both languages and with cultural contacts.

Above all, remember that we’re not putting our kids in Mandarin immersion because it’s a conveyor belt to a great job. We’re doing it to give them options later in life, just as we make them study geometry and pre-calc so if they choose, they have the option of doing math and science based studies in college.

My takeaways are these:

• Learning Chinese gives you the ability to talk to about 1/7th of the people on the planet. In and of itself, this is a wonderful thing.
• Chinese is a beautiful, rich language with 3,000 years of history.
• Learning Chinese teaches you perseverance.
• Learning Chinese teaches you how to memorize (a skill that’s actually still quite useful in the world.)
• Learning Chinese opens your eyes to a much broader world.

That said, if you really want to use your Chinese in the work world, you need to do more:

• You’ll need skills that make you someone companies in China, Taiwan or Singapore want to hire.
• You should probably get a double degree, or a major/minor, in an area with job opportunities and in Chinese, so you have those skills in addition to your language skills.
• Even if you study a liberal arts topic, take a few economics/business courses. It’s always useful to be able to understand how money works. And everyone should be able to use spreadsheets, they’re a remarkably powerful and yet simple-to-use tool for studying information. [Note: I say this as someone with a degree in Swedish literature, and yet I’ve done just fine in life. But I do wish I’d taken a few business classes in college.]
• Do a summer or semester or year abroad in China or Taiwan, and when your Chinese is good enough, take some classes in Chinese.

 

The Actual Worth Of Chinese Language Proficiency

By Frankie Huang

SupChina March 20, 2019

There’s an argument currently happening on Chinese social media about the value of learning English. The very same conversation can be had about foreigners learning Chinese.

Unfortunately, the answers aren’t the same.

A debate over the necessity of English language skills has dominated the Chinese internet these last few days, sparked by a patriotic internet personality who proclaimed English to be a “trash skill” and a waste of time. Many have responded that while they are held hostage by educational and employment requirements for English proficiency, there is in fact substantial demand for Chinese workers fluent in English in the job market.

Demand for foreigners who speak Chinese, on the other hand, is a different story.

A few weeks ago, I inadvertently started a small feud in the China-watching corner of Twitter over the importance of Chinese proficiency for job acquisition and career advancement in China. My tweet that set it off was a bitter one: “No, being fluent in Chinese does not tend to make you a stronger job candidate even in fields where it makes sense, like marketing, finance or international trade. You’d think so, but no. Take it from someone who has to live with this and stop helpfully telling me otherwise.”

Please read more here.