What happens to kids who start in Mandarin immersion in Kindergarten when they hit high school? And once they’re through, what happens in college?

There’s precious little data out there about what options our kids have in high school and what it means for them in college. There aren’t many programs that have gotten to high school yet and of those that have, not many have graduated multiple classes yet.

Sharon Huang, the founder of Hudson Way Immersion School in New York City and Summit, NJ, is putting together a workshop on the topic for the upcoming National Chinese Language Conference in Salt Lake City in May (and you should be fund-raising to send your teachers if your school isn’t able to pay their way!)

Sharon and I spoke and because there’s no national data available, I told her I’d put out a request to parents for at least some anecdotal information. So if you’ve got kids in high school who did Mandarin immersion (or if you know what your district or school had planned) some questions below. I’ll pass answers along to Sharon and will also write them up for the blog.

• What school and school district are you in?
• Does your program have a clear pathway from Kindergarten through 12th grade?
• What happens in high school?
• Do most students continue through high school or do they choose other schools if only one offers an immersion continuation?
• Do students take the AP Chinese exam, and if so when? Are there more classes available for them after they take it?
• What about the SAT Chinese Subject Matter test?
• Bonus questions: What do students do in college? Do they continue with Mandarin? At what level do they test in? Do they go on to study Chinese in college? Do schools seem to care whether they’ve been in immersion or not?

High schools that I know of, from my list of Mandarin immersion programs:

K – 12

9 – 12

• For immersion parents who don’t speak Mandarin we’ve written a two-part series looking at Mandarin from a linguistic perspective, exploring what makes it easy and what makes it challenging. Our hope is that by helping parents understand some of the linguistic features of the language they can better help support their language learner

• Our new online Recommended Chinese Reading List for Childrenrepresents a partnership with the non-profit Great Chinese Reads, and is intended to help parents find high-quality Chinese books at the right level for their children.

• We’ve made free Chinese word gamesavailable for students, to make learning vocabulary more fun.

• Kids can watch or read classic stories herein Chinese, with many more stories to come.

I love the Internet. You can find anything (well, most things) there, and things you never thought you’d find. And people spend tremendous amounts of time and thought writing up answers to questions you’ve always wondered about Just Because It’s Cool.

Take this blog post, “The Battle of the First Grade Chinese Textbooks: China vs. Taiwan vs. States”

A Chinese-American mom gives a great introduction to the textbooks used by beginning students in China, Taiwan and in U.S. in a lot of heritage classrooms.

She shows pages out of the textbooks, discusses what they teach, how many characters, what they expect of kids and generally how literate they get.

Note that the U.S. textbooks she talks about, 馬立平, are used in Chinese Saturday schools for kids who come from Chinese-speaking households where the parents (generally) read and write Chinese. So it’s not really fair to make a comparison between what those schools do and what immersion schools do. But it’s kind of fascinating to see what’s expected of kids in those schools.

All in all it’s a great look at the similarities and differences between China and Taiwan.

A few notes:

The “zhuyin” she refers to is also known as Bopomofo, the phonetic syllables used in Taiwan to help kids learn to read characters. In China they use pinyin.

Later on she says “The one extra difference that people in China learn is 唐詩.” That’s the Tang Dynasty poems that your kid will probably memorize at some point in their school career. All literate people in China know a bunch of these and can recite them. Using lines from them in your speech makes you sound educated (which you are if you can do that, of course.) In China they’re build into the curriculum starting in grade school.

It’s a great blog posting and you can read it here.

在IFS，我们通过在“贵格教育”体系下构建现代、沉浸式、以及多语言的环境，帮助我们的学生养成意志坚强的习惯，从而在日后成为个性鲜明、拥有高沟通技巧和跨文化理解能力的世界公民

At International Friends School we create habits of strong heart and mind through Quaker education in a modern, immersive, multilingual environment.

Our students have the character, communication skills and cultural competency to meaningfully participate as world citizens.

On five stunning acres in downtown Bellevue, the International Friends School opens its door this fall to it’s first classes of 3 and 4 year old children then growing a grade a year until 8th grade. As a Quaker Friends School, IFS joins a 300 year old tradition of excellent academics mirrored by the thoughtful concern for the moral and social development of children. IFS  is the first Friends’s school in Washington state and the first in the world to offer a multilingual environment. Students will learn through a Mandarin/English immersion program with some daily exposure to Spanish. The third commitment of IFS is to offer students a balanced year calendar where learning is more evenly dispersed throughout the school year. Check out more at: ifschool.org

So glad you asked… The good people at Education Week recently published an article on that very topic.