From Global California 2030, a report written by the Communications and English Learner Support Divisions, California Department of Education.

Dual-language immersion programs most frequently use English and Spanish. But California also has programs that offer English/ Mandarin, English/Korean, English/Vietnamese, and English/ Portuguese, to name a few.

These programs, beginning in kindergarten, deliver instruction in both English and another language. Typically, they start with the majority of instruction in the other language and less in English. Gradually, instruction is half in each language, giving students uency in two languages. Students typically stay in the program throughout elementary school.

Researchers have found these programs to be extremely bene cial to students, helping them learn all subjects while also giving them the tools to more easily acquire a third language.

Requests by parents for these programs are already on the rise, especially since the passage of Proposition 58 removed barriers to setting up these programs. As part of Global California 2030, we are striving for even more dramatic growth, with the goal of quadrupling the number of programs from 407 in 2017 to 1,600 in 2030.

Of course, vastly expanding the number of students who speak two or more languages will require more teachers and more programs to train those teachers. In 2016, California had 30 state-approved programs. By 2030, we want that number to grow to 100.

More bilingual teachers means that every school where parents want a program will have teachers with the high levels of academic language skill and authorization to teach in the two languages. By 2030, we want to double the number of teachers authorized to teach two languages.

More language classes means parents who want particular types of programs or courses for their child will have access to them.

To read the full report, please click here.

This sounds like a wonderful program in Boston. Though I have to point out that it isn’t immersion. Chinese is being taught as a foreign language, for one hour a day, according to the school’s website. Which counts as what educators call FLES (Foreign Language in Elementary School.)

Immersion requires that at least half the school day be in Mandarin and that academic courses be TAUGHT IN Mandarin. So you don’t just teach Mandarin, you teach IN Mandarin. For example, math class is taught in Mandarin, or science class. Not just Mandarin Language Arts.

I see this confusion a lot. It’s because today almost all foreign language classes are taught by teachers who speak only the language in class. When I took German in high school, our teacher spoke mostly in English, explaining how German worked. Today, the teacher would speak only in German, using simple words to get across ideas. 

So it’s an immersive language class, but it isn’t immersion. 

Which doesn’t mean what they’re doing in Boston doesn’t sound great. But don’t let someone tell you an hour a day of language class is immersion. It isn’t.

The folks at Boston Renaissance Charter Public School seem quite straightforward about it. There are some private schools out there who claim they’re offering immersion when they actually aren’t (and charging immersion prices for it….)

Here’s how Boston Renaissance Charter Public School describes its Mandarin offerings, FYI:

Our goal was to begin with a strong foundation and expand the program by adding one grade each year. We began with the youngest students, 88 K1 and K2 students began learning Chinese as a second language in school year 2009-2010. In school year 2010-2011, the students who learned Chinese increased to 392 students, including all K1, K2 and Gr. 1 students. These students received Chinese instruction three times a week for a total of 90 minutes. In school year 2011-2012, 468 students from all K1, K2, Gr. 1 and 2 received Chinese instruction. The class was scheduled five times a week for 30 minutes per class. K1-Gr. 1 students receive Chinese instruction 5 times a week for 30 minutes per class. Students in Gr. 2 and 3 receive Chinese each trimester for 5 times a week for 55 minutes per class. Students in the upper grades are allowed to continue taking Chinese as an elective.

 

Teacher’s Perspective: How My School’s Chinese Immersion Program Is Paving a Pathway to Global Citizenship for Inner-City Students

Their educations often hamstrung by their zip codes, generations of urban kids in places like the Boston neighborhood where I teach graduate from public high schools having passed conventional subjects like math and English, but lacking an awareness and appreciation of other languages and societies that would surely enhance their chances of success. Many complete grades K-12 perhaps able to navigate a college campus or the job market, but with little education about the wider world, other than, perhaps, a few years of basic Spanish or French.

As students move on and become participants in the global economy, that lack of exposure to other cultures is sure to hinder their capacity to fully engage and thrive. In an increasingly complicated world, we should be preparing and inspiring young people to make contributions to global understanding, prosperity, and peace.

For almost a decade, Boston Renaissance Charter Public School, where I’ve taught since 2014, has taken a different approach. Located in a transformed mill building, Boston Renaissance educates 900 children from neighborhoods citywide. Many have rarely traveled outside the city, let alone visited the other side of the planet. But, starting in pre-kindergarten, every one of them learns Mandarin Chinese through a unique, internationally recognized program that also immerses them in Chinese culture.

Please read more here.

from our friends at CELIN, the Chinese Early Language & Immersion Network, at the Asia Society.

Global Ambassadors Language Academy (GALA)

My favorite city in North America (and that’s saying a lot as I come from Seattle) is Vancouver, B.C. Would that I spoke Mandarin, was a teacher and had a work visa.

Given as none of those things are true, I put this out to the universe of Mandarin-speaking teachers who might have (or know people who have) Canadian work visas.

The Mandarin-immersion program in Vancouver B.C. (not to be confused with the one in Vancouver, Washington) is hiring one to three teachers. You can see their job description here.

The program begins at Norquay and Jamison Elementary schools. It continues at Windermere Secondary School.

Here’s an article about the program.  And a brochure for Jamison.

The only thing I can’t figure out is why, with 43% of the population having Asian heritage, there aren’t more. The closest city to Vancouver in terms of having an Asian population is San Francisco, where we are 33% Asian. And San Francisco has nine public Chinese immersion schools (five Cantonese, four Mandarin) and three private, all Mandarin immersion.

 

From: The Conversation

July 17, 2018

By Karen D. Thompson, Assistant Professor of Education, Oregon State University

and Michael J Kiefer, Associate Professor of Literacy Education, New York University

Between 2003 to 2015, multilingual students showed two to three times more progress in reading and math than students who speak English only. With this progress, the achievement gaps between multilingual students and their peers have narrowed substantially.

This new analysis we conducted of results from the National Assessment of Education Progress contradicts previous reports that academic progress has stalled for multilingual learners.

We make this observation as former teachers and researchers who have spent more than two decades focused on understanding the experiences of multilingual students.

Our findings not only show that multilingual students are learning more now than in the past, but they also suggest to us that schools and districts are serving these students more effectively.

Please read more here.

A guest column by Jared Turner, The Mandarin Companion

You turn the page. A picture is off to the side as you stare at rows of pinyin. But that’s not all… there is something below the pinyin. You squint your eyes and there it is: a row of Chinese characters. At first glance, you know a lot of these. In fact, at the beginning, you don’t see a single character you don’t know. But you’re not so certain because you’re distracted; it’s that pinyin! It’s got a tractor beam lock on your eyeballs and just like the Millennium Falcon, you can’t get away. Sweat starts to bead on your forehead as you exert every ounce of will to try and focus on the characters, but you are already within the gravitational pull of the pinyin as it crushes every ounce of desire to read characters.

This, albeit dramatized, scenario is what our children commonly experience when given passages, articles, or books to read in Chinese. It’s so common to see pinyin over all of the characters that we rarely take pause to think about why it is this way and how this became the norm.

Why Books Have Pinyin Over Characters

When Chinese children begin learning characters in school, they already speak Chinese. In the 1^stgrade, Chinese characters are introduced to students as characters that represent words they already know and can speak. At the same time, “radicals” or 部首 (bù shǒu), are introduced and meanings of the individual components of a character are explained. New characters are introduced daily, along with short reading texts or 课文(kèwén). At this early stage, characters are learned via rote memorization and pinyin is not even introduced to the children. Some children are still learning their ABC’s (for pinyin as well as for English).

Daily homework includes practice writing of characters taught that day, often with additional characters assigned by the teacher. Termed as 默写(mòxiě) or “writing from memory,” rows of practice characters will be written into small notebooks used specially for writing characters. The next day in class, students are usually quizzed on the characters practiced the night before in 听写 (tīngxiě) where the teacher reads the characters and the students write each one in a booklet.

The first semester of 1^stgrade focuses on learning these building blocks of Chinese characters. They will finish the first semester with having been taught about 250 characters. Towards the end of the first semester, students begin to learn pinyin. By the second semester of the first year, the kids learn more pinyin, and when one of the reading texts for a chapter uses a character that has not been taught, pinyin is put over that character to help the reader. At the beginning, maybe 2-3 characters in the entire text will have pinyin over them.

 

By the end of the first year, the children have been taught over 600 characters and have a solid foundation in pinyin. They learned to read characters first and pinyin second.

When 2^ndgrade begins, all of the reading texts have pinyin above the characters. This is a great help because at this point characters are introduced more rapidly and it is easy to forget a character that was taught some time ago. It is provided as a reference to the readers in case they don’t remember how to pronounce the characters.

Following this process, pinyin over the characters works very well because the students have learned how to read and build a solid foundation in characters before they even began to understand pinyin or English. Characters are much more natural to read than pinyin, and they don’t carry the same rich meaning that characters do, and therefore it’s easy to ignore pinyin when it’s over a sentence.

This learning process works very well for native Chinese speakers and it is highly effective. I have experienced this firsthand, as two of my children attended a local Chinese elementary school in Shanghai.

The English Experience

For those of us for whom our native tongue uses the alphabet, by the time we are in 1^stgrade, we’ve mastered our ABC’s, been introduced to phonics, and have begun to read simple words and sentences. Words that use the alphabet are simple and natural to us. I sometimes joke that Chinese characters look like spooky animals to a new learner, but it’s not too far from the truth. If you don’t know the character, you just don’t know it. You cannot phonetically sound it out, but you can do that with English words if you know the phonics.

The Crippling Crutch

This is the learner’s conflict commonly found in Chinese textbooks and reading materials: pinyin written above the characters. The alphabet-loving-eyes are naturally pulled away from the characters towards the pinyin. After all, it’s an order of magnitude easier to read than characters, even if we knowthe characters! Even if the reader covers up the pinyin, he inevitably uncovers it to “check” or confirm what he read is correct.

So what’s the big deal? The problem is that this creates an over-reliance on pinyin and actually slows down the learner’s path to building speed of character recognition, reading speed, and fluency. This is how it works.

• A key component of reading fluency is reading speed
• Reading speed builds as the reader becomes more familiar with the characters
• The more encounters the reader has with a character, the more she will build the speed of recognition of that character.
• Pinyin over the characters distracts the reader from the characters.
• Pinyin over the characters creates over-reliance on the pinyin.
• Because the reader spends time reading both the pinyin and the characters, the overall reading pace slows down.
• Because the reading speed is slower…
  • The reader reads fewer characters
  • The reader still has time to translate inside her head
  • Progress towards fluency slows down

It is also for these same reasons that I am not a big fan of the “click your way to fluency” concept which many apps and software enable by clicking or hovering over a character for an instant pinyin and translation. They have their place and use for sure, but utilizing these aids to “read” a text does little for your progress towards fluency (mainly because you are understanding the text in English as opposed to understanding it in Chinese).

This also goes for all those books with Chinese on one side of the page and English on the other. Guess which page the kids read? I guarantee you it’s not the Chinese one. Don’t even waste your money on them.

Some may be saying, “but without the pinyin, I can’t read this Chinese text at all!” If you need pinyin over the text to read it, then you’re not reading at the right level, and you’re not learning the words you’re reading. Put it away and find something easier (if you can) and I’ll kindly redirect you back to a previous blog article about reading at the right level.

For all of you publishers and teachers out there, please do not put pinyin over text that is intended for CSL (Chinese Second Language) students. If you have to use it, only put it over the characters that the reader is not intended to know. We know this takes work and is harder to do, but this is what it takes to put the learner first! And for pete’s sake, don’t tell us just not to look at it. It’s about as effective as this button.

Pinyin is a crutch and sometimes we need a crutch to lean on. Without it our learning-lives would be much more difficult. My hope is that we not create an over-reliance on pinyin and help learners walk on their quest to fluency.

The Mandarin Companion is a publishing house based in Shanghai that features easy-to-read novels in Chinese for those learning Chinese. They focus on rewriting great literature, such as Emma, The Prince and the Pauper or Journey to the Center of the Earth. The books are fun and readable for most immersion kids by the time they get to late middle school.