Announcements
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ACTFL 2007, November 16-18, 2007, San Antonio, Texas
Symposium on Asia in the Curriculum, September 27 at 5pm, and all day September 28, Columbia University
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Thinking of someone you know may benefit from this Newsletter?
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By Patrick Hunt
Landon School, Maryland
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From the Editor: Welcome back to school!
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 Once again, it's Back to School time! We hope you have had a productive yet enjoyable summer during which you tied up the loose ends of last year's tasks and planned for the new academic year, while taking some time off for yourself and your family. We know many of you have engaged in very interesting Chinese language related activities over the summer, so we welcome you to send us photos and short articles to share your experiences with our readers.
Meanwhile, in recent months, we have received many inquiries about Chinese immersion programs. In this issue, therefore, we asked Dr. Tara Fortune, an expert and the Immersion Project Coordinator for Center for Advanced Research for Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota, to explain to us what an immersion program is and what research has shown about it. To accompany this informational piece, we invited a reflective article from Rachel Brickson, a rising eighth grade student in Portland Public Schools in Oregon, who have been a student of the Mandarin Immersion Program since kindergarten. Her mother, Betty Brickson, also wrote a piece about her thoughts as a parent. Finally we hear from a principal of an immersion program. Their voices and reflections provide us with an opportunity to think about this model on the personal level.
As in the past, we will share with you news about what is happening with regard to Chinese language education in media and in our schools all over the country. We will continue to provide you with information about all kinds of resources, funding opportunities, and issues. Let us know what you would like to know and how we are doing.
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Immersion Education - Academic Achievement with a Language Twist - By Dr. Tara Fortune
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Increasingly, educators across the U.S. are turning to the language immersion program alternative for developing proficiency in new languages beginning in the early primary years. Immersion programs offer families a content-driven, content-accountable approach to language learning. That means that teachers speak the language students are learning during subject matter instruction and students demonstrate mastery of the academic material as they are learning to understand, speak, read, and write the new language. While a number of programmatic variations have developed since the 1960s when the immersion model was first introduced in public schools, all immersion programs begin by teaching in the immersion language for at least half of the elementary school day. This minimum level of language learning intensity helps create the "need to know," one of many immersion program characteristics that have led to its well-documented success.
Immersion education is grounded in the principles of additive bilingualism and cultural pluralism. This orientation views language and culture as resource, and thus, being bilingual and bicultural as being resource-rich. The goals of an immersion education are three-fold: (1) high levels of academic achievement, (2) bilingualism and biliteracy, and (3) heightened sensitivity to and understanding of diverse cultural groups. As an educational program model, immersion has evolved to serve a few different purposes.
Each of these purposes can be viewed as one of three distinct branches of immersion education known as one-way, two-way, and indigenous immersion.
Read the full text, click here; read more about Dr. Fortune, click here; and for more information about CARLA, click here.
For more information about two-way immersion programs and a listing of immersion schools in the U.S., visit the website of the Center for Applied Linguistics.
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My eight years as a student of an immersion program - by Rachel MinYu Brickson
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 In 1999, I began kindergarten at Woodstock Elementary School. I was in the Chinese Immersion program there. The first day, I sat down at a table with three kids who I didn't know and had never seen before. I could see some of my friends at another table. Though many other kids surrounded me I felt very alone and scared. Before I knew what was happening a woman walked to the front of the classroom and started speaking what sounded to me like gibberish.
The first week was a nightmare for me; I didn't know half of what we were doing. So I sat at the back of the class when story time came, and played with the carpet. I soon caught on to the point of this, though, and for three hours a day, Monday to Friday, we were expected to speak Chinese to our teacher and her assistant. Everything was in Chinese; I would either have to learn and keep up or fall behind. I felt like this was a never-ending journey, like I was part of a wildebeest herd that had to keep up or fall behind. Reading, writing, speaking, and comprehending were what we did. The next year we had the same teacher; she was a wonderfully strict teacher who we respected ...
To read the full text, click here. |
Immersion Programs: a parent's reflection - by Betty Brickson
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 In September my daughter will begin her ninth year as a student in the Mandarin Immersion Program (MIP), one of four language immersion programs offered by Portland Public Schools in Portland, Oregon. Rachael started learning Mandarin as a kindergartener at Woodstock Elementary School in southeast Portland. Now, as a thirteen-year-old entering eighth grade, Rachael is one of twenty-eight students in the first MIP class to advance through middle school into high school.
When our family embarked on this program in 1999, we never anticipated the challenges we would face or the attention this unique program would receive. Mandarin has become a red hot language, surpassing more traditional European languages in interest, and Portland's MIP has emerged as a national model for K-12 Mandarin language instruction. Two years ago, Portland Public Schools joined forces with the University of Oregon and received a major federal grant to create a kindergarten-through-college instructional model for Mandarin. Now, educators and reporters from throughout the nation and the world come to Portland to see what we're doing and learn from our trials and errors. Our kids have been photographed, filmed, tested, taped, assessed and observed. Visiting dignitaries are a frequent sight in their classroom.
To read the full text, click here. |
| As an immersion program principal... - By Mary Patterson |
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 Acting
as the principal of Woodstock Elementary School, in Portland, Oregon
these past four years has been an incredible journey and privilege. On a daily basis I have the unique
opportunity to work with my teacher colleagues offering a Mandarin Language
Immersion program to students in kindergarten through fifth grade within a
public school setting. Woodstock
is one of five schools within the Portland Public Schools District, which
offers Mandarin language instruction and is part of the Oregon Chinese K-16
Flagship Program. We strongly believe that if we truly want to prepare our
children to function successfully in a global society, it is imperative that we
provide them with the opportunity to learn a second language at an early age.
To read the full text, click here.
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| Question of the Month |
 Are there free online language learning materials available?
As in the case with online materials, there are
numerous resources available. We will provide a public service by introducing
some of them to you. In this issue, we identify two that are helpful for K-12
learners of Chinese:
BBC offers a lively introduction to Mandarin Chinese in ten short parts. View them at www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese.
UCLA's Language Materials Project (LMP) covers over 100 Less Commonly Taught Languages including Chinese. Visit www.lmp.ucla.edu and search for the materials according to language (Cantonese or Madarin), proficiency level, grade level, and material type. The search is easy and yields rich information.
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| Publications and Resources |
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 Based on data from nearly 400 interviews with faculty, administrators, and students on forty-two campuses throughout the United States, as well as views collected from more than 100 current secondary and elementary school teachers, Dr. Ann Imlah Schneider finished a report on increasing international components in the undergraduate training of secondary school teachers. Click here for the full report, titled To Leave No Teacher Behind.
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| Chinese in the News |
 School to Teach in Three Languages
The Associated Press, Education Week, July 31, 2007 | Full text
As China's Global Presence Grows, More Metro Districts Add Mandarin to Curriculum
The Detroit News, July 27, 2007 | Full text
To offer lessons in Chinese, school nets new resident expert
The Boston Globe, August 19, 2007 | Full text
Educators See Benefits of Chinese Language Classes
East Brunswick Sentinel Suburban | Full text |
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We welcome your feedback on this newsletter and encourage you to share information that would be of interest to the wider community. Please pass this newsletter on to others who are interested in Chinese language programs in the schools.
Sincerely,
Shuhan C. Wang, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Chinese Language Initiatives
Asia Society
email: chinese@askasia.org
web: www.askasia.org/chinese | |
