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.

A workshop in June for teachers. CARLA does great immersion workshops.

Character Literacy Acquisition in Mandarin Immersion Classrooms: Lessons from More- and Less-Proficient Readers

June 17-19, 2019

Promoting high levels of character literacy among immersion learners is arguably one of the Chinese immersion teacher’s greatest challenges. During this three-day institute, participants will examine key findings from CARLA’s research study comparing Mandarin Immersion (MI) students’ use of strategic reading processes in Chinese (L2) and English (L1). Together we will explore similarities and differences in the oral reading behaviors of more- and less-proficient MI readers, analyze the nature of common substitution errors, and compare decoding and comprehension processes between languages and learner groups. Bridging research to practice, we will work collaboratively to identify and learn about instructional practices that move MI learners towards more fluent character processing and improved text comprehension.

Presenters
Tara Fortune is the Immersion Program director at CARLA and will serve as the lead instructor and institute facilitator. She devotes most of her professional time to the preparation and continuing education of immersion educators throughout the United States and abroad. She oversees research initiatives in immersion that have recently included a focus on strategic character literacy development.

Zhongkui Ju is a Ph.D. candidate in the Second Language Education Program at the University of Minnesota. He has served as a research assistant for the Immersion Projects at CARLA for the past four years. His dissertation research focuses on Pinyin and character literacy in early total Mandarin immersion contexts.

Molly Wieland is the program coordinator for the XinXing Chinese Immersion Program in Hopkins Public Schools (Hopkins, MN). She has been involved in the development of the district’s first Mandarin Chinese immersion program since it began in 2007. Molly oversees curriculum and staff development for K-11 Mandarin immersion teachers. As a parent of a student in the program, she offers both the perspective of program specialist and parent.

Guest presenters will include several veteran immersion teachers and specialists who will share their expertise at the institute.

Target Audience: K–8 Mandarin immersion teachers, program coordinators, and administrators.

• Institute information: https://carla.umn.edu/institutes/2019/mandarin.html
• Registration information: https://carla.umn.edu/institutes/registration.html

Additional Resources for Immersion Educators:

• Immersion Research-to-Action Briefs
  • How Can Learner Language Inform Mandarin Immersion Teaching?
  • Secondary Immersion Teaching and Learning: What Role do Classroom Materials Play?
  • Preschool Immersion Education in Persian
  • Reading Strategies: At Risk and High Performing Immersion Learners

• Materials and Resources for Immersion Education

I recently spoke to parents at Hudson Way Immersion School in New York City and at their campus in Stirling, New Jersey. One question that came up from several families where at least one parent speaks another language was the value of raising bilingual children. There is a great deal of research showing it’s excellent for children. This is only the most recent study I’ve seen.

Six-month-old babies who are brought up hearing more than one language show advantages in early development of attention

TORONTO, Jan. 30, 2019 – The advantages of growing up in a bilingual home can start as early as six months of age, according to new research led by York University’s Faculty of Health. In the study, infants who are exposed to more than one language show better attentional control than infants who are exposed to only one language. This means that exposure to bilingual environments should be considered a significant factor in the early development of attention in infancy, the researchers say, and could set the stage for lifelong cognitive benefits.

The research was conducted by Ellen Bialystok, Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology and Walter Gordon Research Chair of Lifespan Cognitive Development at York University and Scott Adler, associate professor in York’s Department of Psychology and the Centre for Vision Research, along with lead author Kyle J. Comishen, a former Master’s student in their lab. It will be published January 30, 2019 in Developmental Science.

The researchers conducted two separate studies in which infants’ eye movements were measured to assess attention and learning. Half of the infants who were studied were being raised in monolingual environments while others were being raised in environments in which they heard two languages spoken approximately half of the time each. The infants were shown images as they lay in a crib equipped with a camera and screen, and their eye movements were tracked and recorded as they watched pictures appear above them, in different areas of the screen. The tracking was conducted 60 times for each infant.

Please read more here.

And check out the video here.

Update: I’ll be meeting in San Francisco with the owner of the SkyKids Taiwan camp this weekend. If anyone has questions, please send them on to me.

Beth

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Sky Kids is a Taiwanese-run summer program that takes place in San Francisco for  students from China and Taiwan.  Several high school students from the San Francisco Public Schools Mandarin immersion program work there as counselors, so I’ve been hearing about it for a few years now. Local Mandarin immersion families also sometimes host kids coming over, as a way for their children to get a chance to hang out with a Chinese speaker in the summer. 

This year, for the first time, Sky Kids is doing the reverse — a summer camp in Taiwan for English-speaking students who want to immerse themselves in Chinese. At least two San Francisco Mandarin immersion high school students are going over to Taiwan to work in the camp this summer (I know both kids, and their families, and they’re great.)

That said, I’ve never had a child attend the camp and therefore can’t vouch for it. But I thought it might be of interest to families with children in Mandarin immersion. – Beth

2019 Sky Kids Mandarin Immersion Camps @ Taiwan

After 5 years of running our own Mandarin camps and enrichment programs in San Francisco, we are ready to take Mandarin Immersion and Cultural Exchange to the next level in 2019!

From our friends at The Asia Society’s Chinese Early Learning and Immersion Network

Barnard Asian Pacific Language Academy
San Diego, California
Serves students in grades K-5
www.barnardelementary.com

Barnard Asian Pacific Language Academy, located in beautiful San Diego, California, is the only public school in the San Diego Unified School District that offers Mandarin immersion. In 2007, the school started a Mandarin FLES class. In 2010, the school launched a Mandarin immersion program for students in kindergarten and grade 1.

In kindergarten, 80% of the Mandarin instruction is taught by a native Chinese teacher, who teaches Chinese literacy, math, social studies, science, music, and art. English instruction (20% of instruction time) is taught by a native English teacher and focuses on English language arts. From grades 1-5, the program follows a 50% Mandarin and 50% English model. In addition to language arts, the partner teachers have shared responsibilities for teaching math, social studies, science, music, and art in their specific language.

Please read more here.

Greenville Public Schools Chinese Immersion Program

Unlike even a few years ago, more and more books are becoming available that are both readable by Mandarin immersion students and also age-appropriate. That’s great news, because reading has long been the downfall of MI kids, there just wasn’t anything they could read that was also fun to read. I call it the Captain Underpants problem — where are the books your kid sneaks to read under the covers, in Chinese, as they might with the Captain Underpants series?

One nice addition to this growing collection of readable-yet-fun books come from a two-man publishing house out of Shanghai. Even I have successfully read some of their books (and considering how long ago it was that I studied Chinese, that’s astounding.)

They posted a New Year’s blog post that parents with elementary age students might find interesting, as they’re moving into books for younger readers.

Also, a note that will give immersion parents parents a boost — here’s what they say about who can easily read their Level 1 books:

in high school it is typically 3-4^th year Chinese students, in Chinese dual-immersion programs it is usually 4^th to 5^th grade students, and in College programs it is usually students somewhere in the middle of the second year.

Nice to hear that your 4th grader is reading what it takes a high school student four years to get to!

Beth

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Mandarin Companion Preview for 2019

To start off the new year right, we want to communicate with you on what we have been working on. Just to bring you up to speed, Mandarin Companion is largely a two-man operation consisting of John and myself. This is why at times it takes us longer to release things than perhaps it would normally.

That being said, we’ve been developing a lot of things behind the scenes. Today we are pulling back the curtain to give you a preview of what Mandarin Companion has in store for you in 2019.

New 150 Character Level Books

Over the years, we’ve received many emails from readers asking for new levels. During the same period, we’ve had the opportunity to attend a number of Chinese language teaching conferences and speak with Chinese teachers about the challenges they face in the classroom. Finding suitable reading materials is a fundamental problem faced by Chinese teachers everywhere. Finding books that are level appropriate for Chinese learners and are fun to read is like finding the holy grail, and for teachers who have used the Mandarin Companion series with students, they absolutely love them and students who do read them experience a lot of progress.

The downside to all of this is that it typically takes students longer than they would like to get to the stage where they can read our level 1 books; in high school it is typically 3-4^th year Chinese students, in Chinese dual-immersion programs it is usually 4^th to 5^th grade students, and in College programs it is usually students somewhere in the middle of the second year. Unfortunately there are too many students who drop out of Chinese programs because they don’t feel like they are making progress or that Chinese is even within their grasp and consequently never reach the level necessary to read a Chinese graded reader. For anyone who has experienced the immense sense of accomplishment from reading an entire book in Chinese, that experience alone has motivated countless readers to continue studying Chinese.

This has given us the impetus to create a new and lower level of Chinese graded readers in a way that has never been done before. Since we have yet to come up with a good name for this level, we are internally referring to it as “level 0”. Similar to our other levels, it will be based on a defined character set and any new words occurring outside of that set will be introduced as keywords accompanied by pinyin and a definition. This new “level 0” will be written at a 150-character standard which essentially comes from half of the level 1, 300-character standard.

The trick about level 0 is that it will not use any new characters outside of the level 1, 300-character standard. That means that any key words used that fall outside of the 150-character standard can only be borrowed from the level 1 standard. Therefore the vocabulary used in the level 0 standard will be very constrained. We have roughly 10 nouns to work with and a very limited set of verbs. Honestly, at the beginning, the task seemed insurmountable, but we organized the possible words we can use and kicked our creativity into high gear to come up with some new stories that can be written at this level, are of substantial length, and are entertaining to read. These level 0 stories will be written at the 150-character standard and will be three to four thousand characters long. Nothing like this exists yet! They’ll be actual books, not just short stories.

These new lower level stories will reach learners at an even earlier stage and not only help to accelerate their learning, but also inspire them to continue learning Chinese. We are working on five stories to be released in 2019 including “Young Sherlock Holmes” and “My Teacher is from Mars”. We plan to launch this new level in spring of 2019. It’s going to be great!

New Podcast

Both John and I have been working in Chinese education for a long time and people are always asking us for advice about learning Chinese. We find ourselves talking to so many people that we wanted to find a better way to reach out and help even more people through their trek towards Chinese proficiency.

Therefore, in early 2019, we have decided to launch the “You Can Learn Chinese” podcast about learning Chinese. In contrast to the many podcasts intending to teach you Chinese, this podcast will be about learning Chinese. We’ll be discussing the best ways to learn Chinese, the research behind it, and include inspirational stories and guest interviews along the way.

John and I are really excited about this project! We already have recorded a few episodes that are in post-production and plan to launch the podcast soon. We expect it will be an inspiring and edifying podcast, something that we hope you will find helpful and valuable to you, a Chinese learner. We’ll be sending out notifications on how to subscribe and get involved in the coming weeks!

You can find their website here.

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Social studies books in Mandarin

On another note entirely, I also got a note from the folks at Benchmark Education, a company which focuses on textbooks and has a series for immersion students in Spanish and in Mandarin. While not read-under-the-covers books, it’s interesting to see what’s out there for immersion students in terms of social studies and other books. It’s unfortunate they put the pinyin on the same page as the characters, which I believe makes it less useful for immersion students.

https://benchmarkeducation.com/chinese