Close to 200 students to graduate from Norquay elementary program this year
John Kurucz / Vancouver Courier
MARCH 14, 2018 10:09 AM
Norquay elementary’s Early Mandarin Bilingual Program began in 2011, and now the first students to enrol are graduating. Photo Dan Toulgoet
Sashaying across an East Vancouver classroom floor, about a dozen elementary students sang and danced to “Picking Mushrooms,” a well-known Chinese folk song used in celebratory settings.
Up next was a rap interpretation of the Chinese animated character Mulan.
Both performances were sang entirely in Mandarin by kids spanning cultures from across the globe. Events like these were a bit of an anomaly 10 years ago at Norquay elementary, though the school’s Early Mandarin Bilingual Program is actively changing that.
A first of its kind in Vancouver and established in 2011, the curriculum blends Mandarin and English instruction for kids in kindergarten through Grade 7. The first stream of students to go through the entirety of the program leaves the Norquay doors in June. Parents, administrators, PAC members and curriculum writers got together at Norquay March 8 to celebrate that fact.
Many districts are seeing enrollment dropping. It’s interesting to see how kids coming from immersion K – 8 charter school bolster enrollment in the St. Paul, Minn. schools. curious if other districts see this pattern as well.
St. Paul schools’ K-12 enrollment down slightly this year
K-12 enrollment fell slightly this year in St. Paul Public Schools, but not as far as officials feared.
The 103-student drop, to 36,858, is a decrease of three-tenths of a percent. The district had projected a decrease of 549 students.
Research director Stacey Gray Akyea said it’s possible this year is the start of a turnaround, but “overall, enrollment trends suggest that we are on a (steady) decline.”
Kindergarten enrollment declined for a fourth consecutive year, but by just 13 students.
The district saw substantial improvement in ninth grade.
Gray Akyea said high schools got a boost from partnerships with German- and Chinese-immersion charter schools.
And the district’s own eighth-graders in schools with specialized academic pathways, such as aerospace or language immersion, stayed for high school at higher rates than in past years.
I’m attending the Early Childhood Chinese Immersion Forum in San Francisco today. I’ll be posting throughout the day.
Keynote speaker: Helena Curtain
How immersion benefits preschool kids
Helena Curtain speaking on early childhood immersion programs at the Early Childhood Chinese Immersion Forum at the Chinese American International School on March 17, 2018.
Remember that most children in the world are in immersion programs – because in two-thirds of the globe children go to school in a language different than the one they speak at home. Only one-third of children are schooled in the same language they speak at home.
The good news is that we know that whatever kids learn in one language transfers into another, it’s backed up by research.
Not only that, but there are 50 years of research saying that learning a second language will improve your native language.
In addition, people who’ve learned two languages have a much easier time learning a third language. They already intuitively understand the metalinguistic issues and instinctively know how to communicate using a new language.
The Advantages of an Early Start
Children who learn another language before age five us the same part of the brain to acquire that second language that they use to learn their mother tongue.
Starting language earlier gives you longer to get to an language advanced level. If studetns don’t start until high school they don’t have enough time to fully take the language in.
It’s also good to learn early, because of what Curtain calls “the easy and naturalness factor. Little kids don’t worry about are they saying it wrong! They’re still learning their first language, so it’s all new.”
Children also may not realize that they can understand the immersion language, but they do. Curtain told the story of talking with a Kindergarten student in a Spanish immersion classroom.
“Do you understand your teacher?” she asked?
“No, I don’t. But I do everything she tells me!” the child responded.
The phases of language learning:
The nonverbal silent period
It’s not just preschool children who go through this process. Everyone who’s learning a language goes through this.
The telegraphic and formulaic speech period.
“Me go. “Me hungry.” They can get their needs met but not much more.
Formulaic speech.
They have a phrase that they can repeat. “May I go to the bathroom?” “How are you today?”
Productive language.
When they’re actually able to create with language.
NOTE: Parents need to remember that students start out like babies or toddlers, speaking the new language very simply. “So it’s not fair for parents to expect that they can suddenly go to a Chinese restaurant and order as if they were an adult!
Caretaker speech – How teachers begin teaching students in the first years of immersion.
This involve
Simplified Vocabulary
Simplified Phonology
Exaggerated Pitch & Intonation and acting-out
Speaking to children as if they understand even when they don’t.
An example: Your two-year old says, “Wawa.” You respond, “Oh, you want water. Let’s get you a drink. There’s the water fountain. Isn’t that water good?”
Why teachers need to use Mandarin all the time and don’t speak English to students.
Learners need to access the target language through the target language, not through English.
If teachers speak the language 50% of the time, students are learning the language 50% of the time.
[Though if a child’s crying, you talk to them in English but you don’t do it in front of the other students. We’re not going to put the child’s social and emotional well-being at risk, of course.]
What if your child can’t get into an immersion preschool?
Is not having access to an immersion preschool a problem? Not all areas have them, or in areas that do, not all students can get into them.
Starting is better but it’s not a deal-breaker, Curtain told attendees. Programs for three-, four- and five-year-olds are not academic. They’re very concrete, hands-on, play-based and developmentally appropriate. So the students who come to it later aren’t missing out on academic learning. But preschool gives them a head start on the language.
“But if you can’t get your kid into the program until they’re five, that’s still a very young age to get them started and just fine,” Curtain said.
In the fall of 2018 the East Voyager Academy will open in Charlotte, N.C. It will be the first whole-school Mandarin immersion school in the state, joining eight others.
The charter school is launching with Pre-K to Grade 4 for the 2018-2019 school year and will add a grade each year until Grade 8. It will use simplified characters and begin with a 75%/25% Mandarin to English ratio.
Just last month the new school’s Board of Trustees announced that Dr. Tim Murph would be its founding Principal. He has previously served as a teacher, assistant principal, principal, and executive director in numerous school districts, both traditional and charter.
Charlotte has one other school offering Mandarin immersion, Waddell Language Academy, which is a K – 5 magnet school which has four language immersion programs – Chinese, French, German or Japanese. The city also has Spanish K – 8 immersion programs at Collinswood Language Academy and Oaklawn Language Academy.
For more about East Voyager Academy, please see their website here.
From the fabulous LA School Report blog (and oh how I wish we had a benefactor that could create something similar in San Francisco!) The pertinent paragraph is this one:
Of particular importance for a district struggling with persistent declining enrollment, 18 percent of the applications were for students not currently enrolled in LA Unified. The district is losing about 12,000 students a year as rising rents force families out of the city, birth rates decline, and growing numbers choose charter schools. Expanding its magnet and dual language programs is a key district strategy to retain and attract families.
Los Angeles is not the only school district facing falling enrollment. Clearly language immersion programs help bring families to a district. So it’s instructive to see how well that’s working in LA, and what barriers there are to them succeeding.
A record number of parents this year are trying to get into LA Unified’s magnet and dual-language programs, and for the first time, they were able to use a new unified enrollment system that simplifies the application process. District officials said most parents who used the online system gave positive feedback. But some parents encountered errors while others needed outside support to navigate it.
The new enrollment system allows parents to fill out a single online application for the 260 magnet schools and programs and the 132 dual language and bilingual programs, the district’s popular “choice” programs that allow students to attend an LA Unified school other than their neighborhood school. Independent charter schools in LA Unified were not included in the unified enrollment system.
Mandarin immersion programs do many things: they teach Mandarin-speaking students English, English-speaking students Mandarin, serve as magnets to bring middle class families to high-poverty or low-test score schools and in some districts entice families to the district itself to fill empty school seats.
But balancing all those needs and desires is never easy. A case in point – Cambridge, Mass., which requires that schools mirror the socioeconomic makeup of the district as a whole. This has proven complex when higher proportion of families choosing Mandarin immersion are middle and upper-middle class.
The article below talks through some of the issues the program has faced and how difficult balancing the desires of the parents, the school and the district can be.
New tweak filling language immersion class: An urgent result of overlapping complexities
‘Internal transfers,’ school lottery changes, now a one-time seat filling
School Committee member confers with Cambridge Public Schools Chief Operating Officer Jim Maloney at a Jan. 16, 2018, meeting. (Photo: Ceilidh Yurenka)
A third recent tweak was made to elementary school Chinese Immersion program admission rules this week, and though the final School Committee vote was unanimous, it did not come without pushback from some members.
Running optional bilingual programs while balancing the requirements of Cambridge’s school choice lottery is a thorny process, as seen from time to time with the Spanish Amigos School, King Open School’s Portuguese Olá program and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School’s Chinese Immersion Program. The programs have to balance native language levels with socioeconomic parity as managed by a “Controlled Choice” lottery, and in Cambridge, bilingual programs have proven more attractive to upper-income families. In addition, bilingual programs are considered off-limits for “mandatory assignments” – the assigning of schools if a family gets none of three lottery choices, letting the district improve socioeconomic balance in schools.
This combination of dynamics hampers the Chinese immersion program and families who want to attend. Immersion classrooms have waitlists of families wanting to register, but also empty seats, because the waitlists were made up of “paid lunch” families, while the empty seats were reserved for “free or reduced lunch” families to preserve socioeconomic balance resembling the district’s as a whole (about 39 percent free or reduced lunch, though that number has fallen from a more stable 49 percent a decade ago).
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council 