Mandarin Chinese immersion programs: Character building

Last summer, Barbara Odom of Chanhassen looked at her daughter and considered two possibilities for the girl's first days in a Mandarin Chinese kindergarten class.

One, Gabbi would love language immersion and "soak up Mandarin like a sponge." Or two, she would be confused and come to tears because her teacher spoke only Chinese.

Today, Gabbi, 6, loves her teacher, sings Mandarin songs "all the time," mixes Mandarin words and phrases with English, and eavesdrops on strangers at Target.

"There are times when you as a parent question your choices," Odom said. "But it's amazing -- Gabbi is not intimidated by the language."

Last fall, dozens of other parents in the Minnetonka and Hopkins school districts wrestled with the same fears as they enrolled almost 150 kindergartners and first-graders in Mandarin Chinese immersion classrooms.

Like St. Paul's Yinghua Academy, which opened the first Mandarin immersion program in the Midwest in 2006, both districts' programs teach every subject in Mandarin Chinese.

The Minnetonka and Hopkins programs still have kindergarten spaces available next school year for resident and open-enrolled students. Both plan to add a grade each year, and when students reach middle school they will transition into partial immersion and in high school will take Chinese language classes.

During elementary school, the students learn a Romanized version of the language called pinyin in addition to Mandarin characters. Formal English instruction is not introduced until second grade.

And parents, in some respects, are asked to home-school their children as well: They're urged to read to them in English for at least 30 minutes to an hour each day. The students also have homework such as math worksheets.

A little encouragement

Excelsior Elementary School Principal Lee Drolet said she spent time during the first few weeks of the year checking in with teachers and parents and had to encourage a few to "stick it out." But in the end, only one parent decided it wasn't for them, she said.

"The program really requires parents to be sure that they want their child to be bilingual and [understand] that it may be challenging at times," Drolet said.

Hopkins' program -- Xin Xing Academy based at Eisenhower Elementary School -- asks parents to help their children practice Mandarin with short computer-based reading and listening activities, Principal Rosemary Lawrence said.

Both school districts and Yinghua Academy frequently share their "best practices," or instructional techniques that prove most effective, Drolet said. They've also relied on the University of Minnesota's Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition for advice.

According to the center, in the early years of English instruction there may be a lag in immersion students' reading and writing skills, but by fifth grade, they do as well or better than students in English-only classes.

"I know some people are worried about them falling behind in English, but what they gain by learning Chinese [at such a young age] is unparalleled," Odom said.

When traveling abroad, Odom said, she's been "humbled" by the fact that foreigners commonly spoke multiple languages while many Americans speak only English. School officials said that sentiment and awareness of China's growing presence as a major world power are common threads among immersion parents.

"The parents are very brave," said Jie Gao, Gabbi's Mandarin Chinese immersion kindergarten teacher at Excelsior Elementary. "They realize we are becoming a global village."

This is her first year teaching in Minnetonka, but the native Mandarin speaker is a certified teacher with years of experience teaching English in China and Chinese to Westerners.

Following along

Earlier this week the "global village" she referenced seemed to have already taken root at the school. Gao's class of about 21 students sat cross-legged on individual patches of carpet as they recited the month, week and day of the year with a large calendar.

In Mandarin Chinese, days of the week incorporate numbers one through seven ("yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi"). If students know how to count to at least 25 or 30, it's easy for them to follow along.

Most of the students seemed to understand Gao, and she frequently used gestures, pictures and other objects to help them connect Mandarin words to the ideas they represented.

"It's the same [approach] as regular kindergarten classes," Drolet said. Many of the kindergarten students can already count to 100 and read as many as 75 characters, district spokesperson Janet Swiecichowski said.

Later, Gao assigned small groups of students to "learning stations." They're separate tables where four or five students practice reading, counting or other activities for 15 minutes before moving to another station.

The students spent time at the stations until lunch. English phrases blended with Chinese as they played with blocks, counted, read or colored.

But they always switched back into Mandarin when Gao's voice emerged. And as they switched stations, she led the class in a song.

Patrice Relerford • 612-673-4395