This highlights how immersion students end up with college language credit in high school – not bad for 15-year-olds!

Forest Hills Schools, WMU, agreement allows students to earn Chinese minor

Forest Hills Public Schools and Western Michigan University Extended University Programs have entered into an agreement that allows students to earn a full Chinese language minor along with their diploma. The “Collegiate Pathways” program launched in 2017-18 at Forest Hills Northern High School. WMU instructors will teach the classes on site. In 2008, Forest Hills launched a Mandarin Chinese Immersion Program. File photo of Forest Hills Mandarin immersion teacher Qianxi Jiang giving first-year program students a lesson at Meadow Brook Elementary.

By Monica Scott 

March 02, 2017

 

GRAND RAPIDS, MI – Forest Hills Public Schools and Western Michigan University Extended University Programs entered into an agreement Thursday, March 2, that allows students to earn a full Chinese language minor along with their diploma.

Officials say the “Collegiate Pathways” program launching the 2017-18 school year is the first of its kind. The dual-enrollment program will be at Forest Hills Northern High School.

“This partnership with Forest Hills provides a model we hope will be used to deliver similar programs for other districts,” said Dawn Gaymer, associate provost for WMU’s Extended University Programs.

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From our friends at PandaTree

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Though as long-time China correspondent for NPR Anthony Kuhn notes in this story, he’s being studying and working in China for almost two decades.

It’s worth clicking to see the clip of him asking his question in Chinese – and then reading about how the mere fact that a foreigner is fluent made him an online sensation.

Is 2014 a group of parents attempted to create the United Kingdom’s first Mandarin immersion program. To be called the Marco Polo school, it was to launch in 2014 as a “free school,” the English equivalent of a charter school in the United States. The authority that oversees such schools eventually decided it wasn’t inclusive enough, scrapping the project to the distress of parents.

Now a private school has taken on the same project and is set to open in the fall of 2017 in the the west London district of Kensington.

Called Kensington Wade, the school will offer a 50/50 model from preschool through middle school, or age 13. It will cost about $12,500 per year.

[note that the Independent’s headline is a little misleading. There is already a Mandarin immersion school in Europe, but it’s in Hungary so the Magyar-Kínai Két Tanítási Nyelvu ́ ́ Általános Iskola is a bilingual Chinese-Hungarian school, not a bilingual Chinese-English school.]