A guest post by Mary Field in San Antonio, Texas.*

I did a little bit of or back of the envelope math the other day, and I found that about half of my current Mandarin students speak Spanish at home with at least one parent. When I worked in Austin, I noticed a similar trend. Many of our students had family connections to China/Taiwan, but others did not. Many of these students also spoke a language other than English at home, but it was not Mandarin.

It probably seems obvious that many people want to learn (or want their children to learn) Mandarin because of a family connection to the language. And yet we had so many families who spoke languages other than English at home. It was common to hear Thai, Korean, Spanish and other languages at pick up. These families seemed to push back against the idea that “everyone speaks English anyway” and invested in learning more languages, rather than sticking with the home language plus English.

Most Mandarin immersion programs advertise themselves as teaching children a second language. In many communities with Mandarin immersion programs**, it is assumed that children come from English-speaking homes and they will build their Mandarin knowledge entirely through this program.

In three years of looking at these programs, I have never come across any parent literature that says “Yeah, it is probably a good idea if at least one parent can speak some Chinese.” In fact, they all say the opposite: families do not need any. They also do not explicitly encourage families who are already speaking a language other than English at home to apply for their programs.

Utah, the state with the highest percentage of dual language programs, does not require its programs’ English teachers to have an ESL endorsement. This is a clue about who they assume will enroll in their dual language programs. Despite this, if what I have seen over the past few years is not a fluke, then there really is a trend of families adding Mandarin as a third language for children who are already growing up bilingual.

If you look at this graph of Mandarin immersion programs in the United States, you will see that the line starts trending up during the late 90s and early 2000s. This was also around the time that California, Arizona and Massachusetts (1998, 2000 and 2002, respectively) passed their English-Only education laws.***

Looking back, Mandarin immersion programs look like they were ahead of the curve because they embraced linguistic diversity instead of fighting it.

In my experience in Texas, families are pushing for more languages, not fewer. They speak Spanish (or Korean or Turkish) at home, and want more languages at school. Thirty-five percent of Texans over the age of five speak a language other than English at home. Of these, 7 million speak Spanish.

In Bexar county (San Antonio), where I live, the percentage of the population that speaks Spanish at home is higher: 38%.****

These families want to participate in Mandarin programs, and that means for their kids, Mandarin will be a third language (or maybe a fourth!).

If my husband and I are fortunate enough to have children, we will be one of the many Texas families for whom language-learning at school means learning a third or fourth language. My husband is a native Spanish speaker from Mexico and I teach Mandarin. We may choose to add in French or Portuguese, or stick with Spanish, Mandarin and English.

In any case, our family won’t be made of English-monolinguals gaining bilingualism through a new immersion program. Like so many people around us, we are already a multilingual family.

Does the embrace of languages such as Mandarin by already bilingual families mean the end of the United States as an English-speaking country? Not likely.

Fears of a generation of young people growing up without English drove language education trends in the 1990s, as we have seen. Those fears were unfounded then, and still are today. What people who feel threatened by linguistic diversity do not take into account is the asymmetry of language.

If a group of Mandarin teachers in a Mandarin immersion program in Utah have a meeting with their principal, they will speak English. When bilingual children are on the playground in San Antonio with English monolinguals, they will speak English too.

The language of the group will always be the language of the monolingual person, even if there is only one of them. Language is asymmetrical, monolinguals have more power than they assume!

The State of Texas has a long history of multilingualism, hinted at by our history of having “six flags over Texas.” From my perspective, as an educator in the Mandarin language, our families want to keep it that way. They do not want to subtract languages by having schools be “English only” spaces, they want more languages. They speak Spanish, Korean, Turkish, Thai, and others at home – and they want their kids to learn Mandarin too.

Mary Field (梅丽) is the founder of Lotus Chinese Learning, an independent Chinese language school in San Antonio, Texas.

FOOTNOTES:

* The Mandarin Immersion Parents Council website welcomes guest postings by parents, teachers, administrators and students on topics about Mandarin immersion. Please email Beth Weise at weise@well.com if you’ve got something you’d like to have considered.

**I’m talking specifically about dual-language programs, not two-way dual-language programs. In a two-way dual language program (also called two-way immersion (TWI)), a class is made up of 50% English speakers and 50% native speakers of the target language. In a dual language program (also called one-way immersion), none of the students are expected to speak the target language at home, although some students surely do.

*** These laws have since been repealed in California and Massachusetts

****Source: American Community Survey 2009-2013

Public Schools

Every year the Asia Society holds its annual National Chinese Language Conference. It’s the go-to conference for Chinese teaching and has become a hotspot of Mandarin immersion information. I’ve only gotten to attend one but I learned a ton and for anyone in the field it’s truly not to be missed.

This year it’s in Salt Lake City, and as we all know, Utah has the most built-out and organized state-wide language immersion programs in the country. So the school tours alone are going to be worth the price of admission.

That said, the conference is not cheap, so think about doing some fundraising so that your master teachers can go and bring back the latest and the greatest in Mandarin immersion to your students. And if your district is sitting on the fence about creating a program, this would be the place to send recalcitrant administrators…

More info here.

Please find below a lovely essay on Chinese New Year by Jeff Bissell, the head of the Chinese American International School in San Francisco, the country’s oldest Mandarin immersion program.

If you have thoughts on Chinese New Year, your school or Mandarin Immersion in general, please send them along. I am eager to run guest pieces that help parents understand immersion and the wonderful culture their families are embracing.

Happy Year of the Dog, everyone!

Beth

New Year in Liaoning

I’ve frequently said that I came to CAIS for the program, and I’ve stayed because of the community. What makes any community special is the relationships, and strong relationships are, I believe, based on understanding each other’s stories. In that spirit, and on this week’s special occasion, I want to share my own personal story about the lunar new year. In fact, it is a privilege to share it with you, and I’d love you to share your story with me. Here goes….

Just a few days ago, February 9, was the 30-year anniversary of my first move to China. Not long before that, I had quit my job as a public high school history teacher in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I had spent the previous summer in China, and when I returned to Wisconsin in the fall, I couldn’t think about anything except for China. I needed to return. So, operating through snail mail, I secured a job teaching English at a second tier engineering university in Shenyang, an industrial city of (at the time) four to five million people and the capital of Liaoning Province in northeast China. I quit my job and off I went. Liaoning was my home for the next two years.

The reason I left on February 9, was that I had received an invitation (again by snail mail) to spend the lunar new year’s eve with the family of a student I had met that previous summer. The lunar new year fell on February 17 that year, so I figured if I left the US on February 9, I’d be over jet lag in time to enjoy new year’s eve on the 16th. Not many foreigners had the opportunity to spend the lunar new year with a Chinese family in China in those days; I was over-the-moon excited.

I’m from Wisconsin, so I was used to cold winter weather. Shenyang, however was really, really cold, and even though people burned coal bricks to heat their homes, it was always cold indoors as well. As in, see-your-breath cold. When the icy wind blew outside, the curtains on the ill-fitted inside windows swayed with the draft. I wore knitted, fingerless gloves inside, and I started drinking hot tea, not because I liked it, but because the tin enamel tea cups people used conducted heat that kept my hands warm.

The family that invited me to join them for the lunar new year’s eve lived in a small brick one-story house. The house consisted of one small living/dining room with a concrete floor in which the family spent most of their time. There was also a much smaller bedroom that was entirely taken up with a large bed, piled with wool comforters and pillows stuffed with millet, on which several people slept. A narrow entryway leading from the front door to the other two rooms had a two burner stove attached to a propane tank and a small sink. The toilet was outside in the alleyway that led to the house. The family had pasted new year’s couplets on either side of their door. Nowadays, people buy colorful, preprinted new year couplets, but 30 years ago in Shenyang families paid a few cents to calligraphers in open-air markets who used brush pens to write the auspicious sayings on red paper. Inside the house, a few bare light bulbs hung from the low ceiling, casting dim light across the modest dwelling.

This was home to five people during the week; mom was a Peking Opera singer and dad was a store clerk. The middle daughter who had invited me was an English teacher at a local high school. The older brother was a percussionist in the same Peking Opera troupe as his mother (he had long hair and wanted to be a rock drummer), and the younger brother was in high school. On the weekends the youngest daughter would also return home; she was a soccer goalie who had won a spot at a local sports academy, and during the week she slept in the school dormitory at night. The oldest sister was married to a soldier and lived in military housing in another part of the city. They had a two-year-old daughter who everyone called Bingbing, which means “little soldier.” On that new year’s eve, mom, dad, all five siblings, the brother-in-law, Bingbing, a couple of uncles and me–twelve people in all–squeezed inside the little concrete room to cook and drink and eat and welcome in the new year. I later learned that the family was a chai qian hu, a relocated household whose former home had been demolished in order to make way for newer construction. They were living temporarily in that little dwelling until they could be allocated a newer and, they said, slightly more spacious apartment.

Because it was the north of China, we made dumplings or jiaozi. The family pulled out a round folding table and we huddled around it, scooping pork and chive filling with chopsticks from a tin enamel basin and wrapping it with dumpling skins that first uncle and eldest sister rolled out by hand on another round, flour-covered folding table–lightning fast. I remember mom wrapping a piece of red hard candy in one of the dumplings and explaining “who ever eats the dumpling with the candy will have good luck all year!” I now pride myself on the speed with which I can wrap respectable-looking dumplings. That night, however, was my first time; the dumplings were ugly, and in the time it took me to wrap one, the others around the table could finish three or four. Mom, perhaps sensing my insecurity, insisted loudly that my dumplings were indeed “feichang haokan” (“extraordinarily good-looking”). I remember Bingbing being fixated on my nose, which she kept pointing to and exclaiming “da bizi!” (“big nose!”). Each time she would say this, everyone would erupt with laughter, followed by someone saying, “Oh no, your nose is very beautiful.” I knew that no one really thought my dumplings or my big foreign nose were beautiful. We are all useful for something, and that night I was happy to have my dumplings and my nose serve as a sources of amusement to my friendly hosts. One of the uncles had consumed a large amount of baijiu, a kind of grain alcohol made with sorghum that men drank a lot of in Northeast China. As a result, he spoke very slowly, which the eldest brother (the aspiring drummer) pointed out to me. My friend the English teacher tried to teach me how to say “hen man” (“his speech is very slow”). I couldn’t get the tones right, no matter how hard I tried, and this resulted in more amusement–everytime I tried to say “hen man,” the place erupted with laughter. Big nosed, ugly dumpling rolling, pronunciation botching foreigner. All good.

At midnight we all went outside and set off fireworks in the little alley. Last night I pulled out an old letter I had written home the day after the celebration. It read, “imagine 4-5 million people simultaneously setting off shoddily made fireworks in narrow alleyways–it was pandemonium!” I still remember the smoke-filled sky lighting up, and the noise.

That night, among the hundreds of dumplings we wrapped and boiled, I was the one to bite into the one with the red hard candy. Needless to say it was a lucky year for me. I spent 15 of the next 22 years in China, before coming to CAIS. Moving to China 30 years ago fundamentally changed my life trajectory, and it all started with the lunar new year.

I love sharing these memories. In many ways I feel as though my work at CAIS may in some small way lead to others having the opportunity to have the kinds of amazing experiences that I was so lucky to have.

Happy new year!

Best,
Jeff

Whittle launched Avenues: The World School in New York a few years ago. It’s billed as having two programs, one Mandarin immersion and one Spanish immersion. I can’t speak to the Spanish immersion side, but I’ve heard from some parents that it’s debatable whether the Mandarin immersion side is, in fact, immersion. The website says that in K – 5 a full 50% of the curriculum is taught in Mandarin. But parents have told me that there’s less time spent actually in Mandarin than the school’s site would claim, or at least less push on the literacy side than they had expected and wanted.

I haven’t seen any data on what ACTFL proficiency levels students achieve by 5th grade and how they line up with programs we know to be strongly immersion. I would welcome any insight readers might have into what’s actually happening at Avenues. It might tell us what to expect at the new D.C.-based school.

By Nick Anderson February 7 at 7:00 PM Email the author

Education entrepreneur Chris Whittle shows a mock classroom inside a Connecticut Avenue building that will become home to the D.C. campus of a school with global ambition, opening next year with a sister campus in China. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

An education company backed by U.S. and Chinese investors is launching a global private school for students ages 3 to 18, with the first two campuses scheduled to open next year in Washington and the Chinese coastal city of Shenzhen.

Whittle School & Studios will offer foreign-language immersion — Chinese in the United States, English in China — with a curriculum centered on mastery of core academic subjects, ­student-driven projects and off-campus learning opportunities in major world cities.

On Thursday, veteran education entrepreneur Chris Whittle plans to announce the debut of the D.C. campus in fall 2019 at a prominent site near a cluster of embassies — the striking aluminum and glass edifice at 4000 Connecticut Ave. NW once known as the Intelsat building.

Please read more here.