You can see the full list here:

Mandarin immersion school list

As always, if your school is not listed, or is listed incorrectly, please refer to the list of questions below. Answer as many of them as you can and email  to me and I’ll update the list. If you don’t know all the answers, don’t worry. We’d rather list a school even with a few boxes empty!

Note there are tabs on the list. The first page is U.S. schools, the second Canadian and the third International.

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School Name

School District name

Address

City

State/ZIP (Province/Posale Code in Canada)

Phone

Grades at school

Public/private/charter?

Date the Mandarin immersion program began (Kindergarten only, not preschool)

Percentage of the day taught in Mandarin/English.

Whole school or strand within a school?

Do you teach Simplified or traditional characters? [you can tell if in the word for school they write it 学校 (simplified) or 學校 (traditional)]

Number of classroom in Mandarin per grade.

One-way or two-way immersion?

Website address.

Other languages offered? (i.e. some schools have multiple immersion strands.)

Is the school art of the Flagship – Chinese Acquisition Pipeline consortium?

Singapore is about 75% ethnic Chinese, but that doesn’t mean that people actually speak Chinese at home. School is taught in English, though all students take a second language, either Malay, Mandarin or Tamil. The original system presumed that kids were coming from non-English speaking households and needed to learn English, while getting literate in their home language. But it’s now quite common for kids to come from English-speaking homes where their theoretically ‘home’ language is in fact a second language. So now private language-immersion preschools are starting to pop up there, to give kids a start in their “mother tongue” as Singapore likes to call it.

It’s all quite fascinting.

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Early start in learning Mandarin

British housewife Fiona Ratz believes the early exposure to Mandarin helped her daughter Amy (in red), a Primary 2 pupil, do well in the language.

Five-year-old Soo Song Xuan spoke almost no Mandarin two years ago.
His parents, businessman Soo Wee Kiat, 40, and Ms Vanessa Wong, 40, a personal assistant, used to converse with him mainly in English at home.

Worried that he would be unable to catch up with the mother-tongue subject in primary school, Ms Wong transferred him last year to EtonHouse International Education Group’s Chinese-language immersion programme that is run at its branch at 223 Mountbatten Road.

The group piloted the programme for two nursery classes there three years ago. Classes including those on literacy, numeracy and arts are taught entirely in Mandarin.

Just a year into the programme, where Song Xuan and his peers would spend about six hours every day with a Mandarin-speaking teacher, Ms Wong says she could see a vast improvement. “Now, he talks to us in Mandarin about half the time at home.

He loves Mandarin pop songs and enjoys doing his Chinese homework. When we go to the library, he would want to borrow Chinese books.”

Please read more here.

Gavilan Peak Mandarin Program Students Illustrating Academic Achievement, Intellectual Growth

Elizabeth Medora ~ Staff~ 5/6/2015

ANTHEM – Problem solving and critical thinking are some of the most important skills students can put into practice. The Gavilan Peak Mandarin program is helping to teach students these life skills.

Gavilan Peak School is completing its fifth year of free Mandarin education this school year; Mandarin partial immersion and basic Mandarin classes are free at Gavilan Peak. School staff reports that students of Mandarin have been showing high achievement across the academic field as they employ the skills they are learning in Mandarin classes.

“Students who are in the immersion program have developed outstanding problem solving skills,” noted Kimberly Cash, Lead Teacher/Mentor of the Mandarin Project Staff at Gavilan Peak. “When learning any new language, students have to be very focused on what the teacher is trying to convey to them; therefore, they must be able to think about the words, and make connections in order to understand the content.”

Please read more here.

Florence boy finds practical use for his classroom lessons at Chinese Immersion Charter School

JERREY ROBERTS

By GENA MANGIARATTI
Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
(Published in print: Thursday, May 21, 2015)
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NORTHAMPTON — When 12-year-old Hunter Palm visited China for two weeks in April with his mother and grandmother, the locals, hearing him speak Chinese, asked: “How long have you been living in China?”

“Hunter was our interpreter, thank goodness,” his grandmother, Jody O’Brien, said at her grandson’s home on Maple Ridge Road in Florence. “If we hadn’t had Hunter, we wouldn’t have been able to ride the bus or order food.”

For O’Brien, 79, a nurse from East Longmeadow, the trip was her sixth assignment with Global Volunteers, a service organization that sends volunteers abroad. On previous trips, she has volunteered as a nurse in a public health clinic in Mexico and worked with children with disabilities in an orphanage in Romania. She has also worked in schools in St. Lucia, the Cook Islands, and the Chinese city Kunming.

This time, her daughter Kelly Palm and grandson, a sixth-grader at the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School in Hadley, came with her. The three generations taught English to students at the Xi’an Biomedical Technical College, in Xi’an — a city of over 8 million in central China’s Shaanxi province.

Please read more here.

CLEF 2016: April 15-16 Literacy: The Core of Global Competency

More Information available here.

CLEF 2016 will take place at the Westin San Francisco Airport Hotel on April 15-16. The conference theme is “Literacy: The Core of Global Competency”. Please save the dates and join us! The Chinese Language Education Forum (CLEF) is an annual conference dedicated to bringing together PreK-16 teachers, scholars, administrators and other professionals in the field of Chinese language education worldwide to share best practices, research findings and inspiring ideas. This conference will provide you with all you need to thrive in your Chinese classrooms and programs. CLEF 2016 “Call for Proposals” will be open soon

As far as I know, the U.K. doesn’t yet have any Mandarin immersion K – 8 schools. The one that had been proposed, Marco Polo Academy, didn’t get off the ground. And I love it that this preschool is being launched by a man with such a lovely Welsh name as Cennydd — Beth

UK’s first Mandarin-English bilingual nursery established to meet growing demand for second language learning in early years

04-Aug-15
Article By: Ellie Spanswick, News Editor

In May, earlier this year, father of one Cennydd John opened the UK’s first bilingual Mandarin-English day nursery in East London after discovering many of his local provisions were unable to provide the type of childcare he sought for his young son.

Cennydd John

Mr John has more than 10 years’ worth of experience, academically and professionally in all things Chinese, a Masters in Chinese and distinction in oral Mandarin, in addition to experience running his own educational consultancy, helping Chinese students secure places at UK and American universities.

Speaking about his decision to establish the innovative new nursery, he said: “I created Hatching Dragons when I was looking for childcare for my son. I felt so un-inspired by the provisions I looked at, none of them were offering anything different than the care I could offer him at home. Although they could provide care for my son, they weren’t gifted in early years education or helping children develop.”

Hatching Dragons was created on the principle of providing children with a full Mandarin-English immersion experience all day–every day, ensuring that language is not taught, but picked up through daily activities within the nursery environment. The majority of children at the nursery come from families where Mandarin is not spoken.

Please read more here.

This is a fascinating trend. I presume the high school is not overcrowded, and presumably this brings in money, as well as adding an interesting cultural experience for the high school students.  I keep saying there’s an opportunity for someone to create an immersion boarding school for English and Chinese-speaking students in the U.S., though I’m not sure how the Chinese families would feel about having their kids take any classes in Chinese.

The Marshfield School District is working to develop a program for Chinese students to attend the high school for the 2016-2017 school year.

Through a partnership with the University of Wisconsin, the Marshfield School District plans to develop a program for Chinese students to pay tuition to attend classes and graduate from Marshfield High School, said Mike Nicksic, an assistant principal at the school who is involved in the immersion program. Following graduation, the Chinese students could qualify to attend college at the University of Wisconsin-Marshfield/Wood County.

Marshfield’s sky of stars surprises Chinese students
Liz Welter, News-Herald Media 4:22 p.m. CDT July 27, 2015

MARSHFIELD – The glow of the nighttime sky with its vast array of twinkling stars is a new sight for the 16 teenage students from China who are participating this summer in an English immersion program at Marshfield High School.

“We don’t see stars,” said Zhang Le Tao, 17, who prefers the nickname George. The air and light pollution in his home city create a haze so the stars aren’t visible, he said.

His hometown in southeastern China, Zhiangjiagang, has about 1.3 million people, plus skyscrapers and heavy vehicle, bicycle and pedestrian traffic.

“The environment here (is) very nice,” George said while he and the students were at the district’s school forest Friday. George looked up to the sky and said, “Very blue. Clouds very white. Not like China. Here, the air (is) fresh.”

Please read more here.