Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education

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  • San Mateo, Calif. rejects Mandarin immersion charter

    One board member was especially concerned that it wouldn’t meet the needs of special education students.

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    County board unanimously denies Mandarin immersion charter school proposal
    by Barbara Wood / Almanac

    The San Mateo County Board of Education on Wednesday night, Feb. 4, unanimously denied the Menlo Mandarin Immersion Charter School’s proposal to open a new school in the Menlo Park City School District.

    The county board used as its grounds for denying the petition a report by county staff analyzing the petition to open a Mandarin immersion charter school next fall.

    Board members said they found that the charter petition had too many flaws to be approved. The petition, if approved, becomes the governing blueprint for a charter school and can only be changed by a vote of the group originally granting it.

    “I can only vote to deny this appeal,” said board member Joe Ross, who represents the Menlo Park district area. “I don’t think it would do the public, or the community, or the parents, any good to move forward with this petition. He pointed to a requirement in the school’s petition that all students in second grade and beyond must pass a Mandarin proficiency test to be admitted to the school. County staff said that requirement violates a state law that says all students who want to attend a charter must be admitted if there is room for them.

    “I am afraid that this assumes that all students beyond second grade who do not speak Mandarin actually can not learn at this school,” Mr. Ross said.

    Board member Susan Alvaro said she was concerned about the lack of specifics about how the school would deal with special education students. “I am really concerned about the students in our county who are struggling and not making it,” she said.

    Please read more here.

  • Which languages are hardest to learn for English speakers?

    A nice info graphic.

    I speak Swedish, which is in the easy category. Oh well.

    See the story and graphic here.

  • North Carolina Mandarin immersion program in Raleigh set to become magnet school

    At Stough Elementary in Raleigh, students learn in Mandarin

    BY SARAH BARR

    The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.)January 30, 2015

    RALEIGH — Kindergartner Ava Fletcher has been learning Mandarin for just a few months in her classroom at Stough Elementary School. But already she can write her name in Chinese characters, sing songs such as “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” and chatter confidently in Mandarin about the books she loves and the friends she plays with.

    “I like that I get to learn and that I get to sing,” said Ava, 6, of her class.

    Eighteen students are enrolled in the Mandarin immersion program at Stough Elementary on Edwards Mill Road in Raleigh. The program began this year with students from the school’s neighborhood attendance area and will become a magnet next year, so students from across the county can apply to attend.

  • Chinese Early Language and Immersion Network updates

    Encourage your principal/teachers to fill out the survey listed below. It’s crazy that so many of our programs struggle to reinvent the wheel so sharing curriculum that’s been developed for Chinese and Common Core only makes sense.

    Though those of you from schools that are part of the national Flagship-Chinese Acquisition Pipeline are ahead of the game here and don’t need to, F-CAP is already doing that sharing and it’s a beautiful thing.

    The Chinese Early Language and Immersion Network CELIN and F-CAP both support immersion programs and are huge helps as we move forward. Encourage your teachers and staff to find out about what these networks offer and make use of their expertise!

    –Beth

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    CELIN Connection

    Happy New Year! We hope you had a peaceful, restful holiday. To welcome the new year, we have updated the Research and Resources section of the CELIN web pages and added two new sections to the Resources for Educators. We hope that you will find these helpful in your work:
    • Important resources on early Chinese language learning and immersion programs.
    • Four presentations given at the 2014 ACTFL Convention and World Languages Expo in San Antonio, November 21–23. Presenters discuss key issues in the field of Chinese language education: lessons learned by experts in the field, the vitality and sustainability of Chinese heritage language schools, and uses of digital technologies and selection of instructional materials to promote student engagement and learning.
    Also take a look at the Study Abroad pages in Ask the Experts, where you’ll find detail-rich student and teacher testimonials, and inspiring photographs (such as this image to the right—courtesy of the Chinese American International School in San Francisco).

    CELIN has received numerous requests for information about curricula used in Chinese language education. Therefore, we decided that this will be one area of our focus this year. We’re conducting a survey of curricula that are used in Chinese language education and that educators need. Can you please take five minutes to complete this survey? This is an ongoing project, and we will be sending out information as we proceed. Stay tuned to find out what we are learning!  –Shuhan Wang and Joy Peyton

  • Immersion teachers are like gold (so be nice to yours)

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    Utah language immersion teachers in short supply
    WEDNESDAY , JANUARY 28, 2015 – 1:45 PM
    “Elise Taylor and Jake Beus, from the U.S. Institute of languages, pack software into boxes for…

    By Dana Rimington

    Standard-Examiner correspondent

    2 2 0
    It is no easy task getting dual immersion teachers for the Spanish, Chinese, or French programs for the 11 elementary schools in Davis School District, four elementary schools in Weber School District, and two elementary schools in Ogden School District with immersion programs.

    It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there says Davis School District Elementary World Language Supervisor Rita Stevenson as immersion programs across the state vie for the few teachers who do graduate from local universities with majors in Spanish, French, or Chinese, or education graduates who are native speakers of those languages.

    “It is nice when we can find them, but the biggest problem is that local universities are not producing enough teachers through the education program to fill our needs,” Stevenson said, so they find guest teachers from host countries through the state office of Education.

    However, for teachers coming from other countries, it is a long process. Nereida Lõpez, who is from Spain teaching kindergarten dual immersion at Lincoln Elementary, began the process a year before she began working in the U.S. in the fall of 2013. Lõpez had to go through a series of paperwork and interviews with her host country, all using her own funds.

    Please read more here.

  • Do you speak Chinese at home? Read this.

    4 Reasons Why Your Child Is Passive Bilingual

    September 8, 2014 by  15 Comments

    Have you ever met a family where parents speak to a child their heritage language but a child responds back in the community one? Or maybe this is the case in your multilingual family?

    It certainly could be frustrating: you were always speaking the target language with your child and maybe he/she even spoke it to you back as a little kid but eventually started to use more majority language with you and finally completely switched to it.

    But be positive, your child is still bilingual with the level of bilingualism called passive or receptive, when she accumulates the language enough to understand it but chooses not to use it for various reasons.

    What are these reasons and are there any solutions if you would like your child to be an active bilingual?

    Please read more here.

  • Don’t worry that your teacher is reading aloud to your kids — it’s a good thing

    A new study out finds that kids being read aloud to helps their reading overall. Sometimes parents with kids in immersion worry that their teachers shouldn’t sell be reading aloud to kids in upper grades. But it turns out getting read it helps reading overall. A key quote:

    But reading aloud through elementary school seemed to be connected to a love of reading generally. According to the report, 41 percent of frequent readers ages 6 to 10 were read aloud to at home, while only 13 percent of infrequent readers were being read to.

    Study Finds Reading to Children of All Ages Grooms Them to Read More on Their Own

    Cue the hand-wringing about digital distraction: Fewer children are reading books frequently for fun, according to a new report released Thursday by Scholastic, the children’s book publisher.

    In a 2014 survey of just over 1,000 children ages 6 to 17, only 31 percent said they read a book for fun almost daily, down from 37 percent four years ago.

    There were some consistent patterns among the heavier readers: For the younger children — ages 6 to 11 — being read aloud to regularly and having restricted online time were correlated with frequent reading; for the older children — ages 12 to 17 — one of the largest predictors was whether they had time to read on their own during the school day.

    Please read more here.