Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education

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  • An interesting take on American v Chinese attitudes towards sports for kids

    The American dad writing in the blog post link below used to live in China and now lives in Chicago. He’s surprised at how much time, attention and money goes into kids’ sports here. An intriguing point of view. Though American parents might say that sports are in addition to the 6 hours a day kids spend in school learning, so it’s a balance.

    http://www.chicagonow.com/where-are-we-going-dad/2014/11/what-chinese-parents-do-better-than-americans-education-over-sports/

    Though at the same time, China is working to get more kids playing soccer. Unclear, however, if this is merely to beef up the nation’s overall standings worldwide or because it’s supposed to make for better-rounded adults.

    http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1657332/beijing-boost-football-xi-jinpings-favourite-sport-100000-students-three

  • Houston’s new Chinese immersion school campus – oh my goodness it’s nice

    August 2016 opening planned for Mandarin Chinese Language school

    By Annette Baird |  December 22, 2014
    • This is an architect's rendering of the common area of the Chinese Mandarin Language Immersion School under construction in the Galleria area. This is an architect's rendering of the common area of the Chinese Mandarin Language Immersion School under construction in the Galleria area. Photo: Mandarin Chinese Language Immers
      Photo By Mandarin Chinese Language Immers
      This is an architect’s rendering of the common area of the Chinese Mandarin Language Immersion School under construction in the Galleria area. This is an architect’s rendering of the common area of the Chinese Mandarin Language Immersion School under construction in the Galleria area.
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    • This is an architect's rendering of the common area of the Chinese Mandarin Language Immersion School under construction in the Galleria area. This is an architect's rendering of the common area of the Chinese Mandarin Language Immersion School under construction in the Galleria area.
    • Here's an exterior view of what the Chinese Mandarin Language Immersion School will look like when it is completed. Here's an exterior view of what the Chinese Mandarin Language Immersion School will look like when it is completed.
    • Celebrations accompanied the December ground breaking for the Chinese Mandarin Language Immersion School in the Galleria area.
    • Here's an interior view of what the Chinese Mandarin Language Immersion School will look like when it is completed.

    Construction is under way of Houston Independent School District’s new campus to accommodate its Mandarin Chinese Language Immersion Magnet School, currently housed in Gordon Elementary School in Bellaire.

    The design of the $32.2 million campus focuses on the Chinese character Ming, a sun and moon concept in which bright colored learning and academic areas will be located in the sun wing, representing energy, while community spaces will be in the moon wing for a more subtle and reflective area.

    “We wanted a building to reflect and accommodate our unique program,” vice principal Dane Roberts said. “It will have a much more community feel than you might have in a secondary school.”

    Designed by PBK Architects, the 118,000-square-foot facility, at 5440 W. Alabama, will be built to utilize 21st century learning technology for regular and language immersion learning. It will feature flexible learning spaces, where classrooms can be combined for larger groups, a light-filled learning and technology commons in the three-story sun wing, a technology and design lab for robotics and 3-D printing and a top-notch audio system so students can clearly hear tones and language. The new campus also features a gym, cafeteria and auditorium with a stage for performances.

    Please read more here.

  • Charter Mandarin immersion school looking to start in San Jose, Calif.

    Screen Shot 2014-12-08 at 6.59.58 PM

    Calling families from the San Francisco Bay Area!

    位育國際學校Wei Yu International Charter School is a K-8 Mandarin immersion public tuition-free charter school that is currently petitioning for approval to open grades K and 1st in Fall 2015 in West San Jose. The Wei Yu petition was denied at the district level a few weeks ago.

    The founding team wants to assure you that this does not reflect on the quality of our program. There were a lot of areas in the district report that were inaccurate so we have submitted an appeal with the Santa Clara County board. If you haven’t had a chance to review our rebuttal letter or letters of support, we encourage you to review them on our website here: http://www.weiyucharter.org/resources.html

    The public hearing for our appeal is this Wednesday, December 10th at approximately 6 pm at the Santa Clara County Office of Education (1290 Ridder Park Dr, SJ). We urgently need families who want Mandarin immersion in the South Bay to attend the hearing. We can’t stress enough how critical your presence will be to show the board how much community support there is for the school. We realize how busy all of you are so we thank you in advance for considering it!

    if you or anyone you know will have a child in K or 1st next fall and would like to enroll your child at Wei Yu if we are approved, please send me an email at felicity.miao@gmail.com. Every additional signature we get strengthens our case and shows the board that there is demand for our school.

    Please spread the word about this with your friends, family, and other Wei Yu supporters. We truly believe that Wei Yu will be an opportunity to enable all students, regardless of ethnic background, socio-economic status, or heritage language, to become bilingual and bi-literate in both Mandarin and English.

    Read more about us at http://www.weiyucharter.org

  • Readers of Chinese use different parts of the brain from readers of English

    Dyslexia has a language barrier

    Readers of Chinese use different parts of the brain from readers of English, write Brian Butterworth and Joey Tang

    Alan’s parents are English, but he was born and grew up in Japan. He would pass as a native speaker of either language. What brought Alan to the notice of Taeko Wydell, an expert on Japanese reading, and Brian Butterworth, was that he was severely dyslexic, but only in one language. In the other, he was probably in the top 10% of readers of his age.

    New research by US and Chinese scientists challenges our interpretation of how it is possible to be dyslexic in one language but not another. It shows that readers of Chinese use a different part of their brains to readers of English.

    The study, led by Li Hai Tan and reported in Nature, may unexpectedly tell us some key things about how dyslexia affects the brain. Brain functioning, and indeed structure, is moulded by experience. Learning a regular spelling system such as Italian creates differences in brain organisation compared to learning highly irregular English. Italian has 26 rules to learn, which takes about six months; English takes longer because there are many irregularities (and several hundred rules). In Chinese 3,500 characters are needed to read the equivalent of the Daily Mail and about 6,000 characters to read books.

    Please read more here.

  • Adopted children may retain brain patterns of their birth language

    Brain response to a ‘lost’ first language

    Finding 'lost' languages in the brain
    3-D rendered view of fMRI activation patterns for processing Chinese tones showing the unique pattern for the monolingual French group, and similarities in the patterns of activation for both the Chinese-French bilingual and the International …more
    An infant’s mother tongue creates neural patterns that the unconscious brain retains years later even if the child totally stops using the language, (as can happen in cases of international adoption) according to a new joint study by scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital – The Neuro and McGill University’s Department of Psychology. The study offers the first neural evidence that traces of the “lost” language remain in the brain.

    “The infant  forms representations of  sounds, but we wanted to see whether the brain maintains these representations later in life even if the person is no longer exposed to the language,” says Lara Pierce, a doctoral candidate at McGill University and first author on the paper. Her work is jointly supervised by Dr. Denise Klein at The Neuro and Dr. Fred Genesee in the Department of Psychology. The article, “Mapping the unconscious maintenance of a lost first language,” is in the November 17 edition of scientific journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).
    Please read more here.

  • The United States’ “Mandarin moment”

    Mandarin’s moment

    Updated: 2014-11-28 11:48

    By William Hennelly(China Daily USA)

     

    Mandarin's moment

    Zhang Shanshan teaches Kalen McBrien, 5, basic Mandarin vocabulary about colors and fruits at the Hudson Way Immersion School. Photos by Lu Huiquan / For China Daily

    Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg addressed a Beijing audience in Mandarin last month. He has been studying a language spoken by 1.3 billion Chinese, and he’s not alone. The study of Mandarin in the US is booming, WILLIAM HENNELLY reports from New York.

    The pupils in teacher Zhang Shanshan’s class at the Hudson Way Immersion School were asked what they needed to do to get more smiley faces on an assignment.

    “Ting lao shi (listen to the teacher),” the mostly 4- to 5-year-olds answered uniformly in Mandarin with hardly any foreign accent.

    Soon the class began to get noisy. Sensing this, the teacher asked if she should erase some smiley faces off the blackboard, making the lesson longer.

    “Bu” (no), the children replied.

    “When I first taught this class, they didn’t understand what the Chinese storybook was about,” Zhang said. “But after two or three months, they can read many of the characters in it.”

    “By the time they are 9 or 10, if they turn their backs, you can’t tell” whether they are native Chinese or not when speaking, said Elizabeth Willaum, a veteran language-immersion expert and director of Hudson Way. “Learning Chinese isn’t just about marketability,” she said. “When you learn a language, the culture opens to you.”

    Please see more here.

  • Portuguese town makes Mandarin mandatory from 3rd grade on

    A Portuguese Town Is Making Mandarin Mandatory For Eight-Year-Olds To Gain A Foothold In China

    The small industrial town of Sao Joao da Madeira, Portugal's shoe capital which specialises in luxury models, has now made Mandarin compulsory for its 8- and 9-year-olds© AFP Patricia de Melo MoreiraThe small industrial town of Sao Joao da Madeira, Portugal’s shoe capital which specialises in luxury models, has now made Mandarin compulsory for its 8- and 9-year-olds

    Lisbon (AFP) – Five hundred years after the Portuguese became the first Europeans to establish sea trade with China, a town in northern Portugal is counting on its youth to secure a new foothold in the Asian giant.

    The small industrial town of Sao Joao da Madeira, Portugal’s shoe capital which specialises in luxury models, has now made Mandarin compulsory for its 8- and 9-year-olds.

    The aim is to give their youth the competitive tool to help sell its footwear to China.

    And the government, battling to put six years of debilitating crisis behind, is watching the town’s experiment closely to see if it can be replicated throughout the country.

    “Chinese is the key which will open the doors to the world’s biggest market,” said Dilma Nantes, Sao Joao da Madeira’s city councillor on education.

    China may be known as the factory of the world, and is indeed the biggest producer of footwear — making 10 billion pairs a year — but Portuguese shoe-makers are starting to step into the huge Asian market.

    Read more:  http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-mandarin-compulsory-as-portuguese-town-seeks-foothold-in-china-2014-11#ixzz3KDdTgvlB