I have written up two posts about language programs in the Bay Area (the East Bay, to be exact) for Today’s Mama, where I now occasionally blog on Chinese education and culture in the Bay Area. One post is about language immersion programs and one is a listing of Chinese summer camps. I hope it is useful for those of you in the area. Please let me know if I overlooked anything.
PhD in Parenting blog has a lengthy and interesting post about raising bilingual children, and why and how to do it. Her conclusion for the “why”: “Overall, there seems to be a correlation between learning a second language and overall intelligence and open mindedness.” She also has a good overview of the various methods to use, depending on your family’s situation and environment. The post has generated a lively discussion on the topic in the comments section. Check it out here.
*The San Francisco Examiner lists activities and events for celebrating Chinese new year in the area. Hurry, the two week holiday ends this weekend with the Lantern Festival (and the big New Year parade in San Francisco Chinatown).
*A monthly Blogging Carnival focuses on linking bloggers who write about raising bilingual children. This month’s carnival was hosted by SpanglishBaby and features a link from yours truly. Lots of good material in there.
*A new study says babies can be bilingual before birth if their mom speaks two languages while they are in utero.
Much attention has been paid to the current craze for studying Chinese, especially in the U.S., and Mandarin programs in public and private schools are mushrooming, as an article I posted last week demonstrates. The obvious line of reasoning goes that China’s increasing clout on the global economic stage means that learning the language will present future financial benefits for today’s young learners. All true, but there can be other more compelling reasons to learn the language as well. On her blog, Aimee Barnes writes movingly about how Mandarin helped save her from her learning disability and a troubled family life. “In Mandarin, as in poetry, I had finally found my own path through memory, cadence and tone. Through the rhythm of a character,” she writes. Read the rest of her beautiful post here.
From around the Internet:
- “Foreign Languages Fade in Class — Except Chinese” from the New York Times, on the growing popularity of Chinese in American schools amid declining availability of foreign language courses in general. Some notable stats: “Rough calculations based on the government’s survey suggest that perhaps 1,600 American public and private schools are teaching Chinese, up from 300 or so a decade ago” and Chinese is about to surpass German to become the third most popular language for AP courses.
- Benefits of Studying Chinese from the World of Reading Ltd Blog – a handy list for anyone contemplating studying the language.
- Education as a Path to Conformity in the New York Times. Looks at the pressures placed on Chinese students and the lack of creative thinking in Chinese education, by Didi Kirsten Tatlow, whose six-year-old is in a local school in China.
East Bay Express, our local free weekly, has published a very nice article about my son’s Mandarin immersion school here in the Bay Area. It gives a good picture of how an immersion classroom works and why full immersion is really the best way for children to learn a second language. I recommend the article, whether or not you are local, as it’s an interesting read for anyone thinking about teaching or learning languages.
A few readings from around the web that may be of interest:
- “Child’s play in China” a British journalist and father writes about the different attitudes toward play he sees in his children and their Chinese classmates
On a related note, an American teacher in Beijing writes about a generation of only children in China being educated without much training in leadership or team work.
And on the topic of play (about which I feel strongly), here is an excellent public radio program on “the educational power of things like play, sports, music, memorization and reflection”:
(If you can’t hear this, click here.)
This last one is not directly China related, though I have found that my children learn Chinese, like other subjects, best through playing, creating, singing, and imagining in the language, not through memorization or sitting still in a classroom and being taught. This program presents a powerful argument for why that is so.
- NPR reporter Scott Simon writes a beautiful essay in the Wall Street Journal reflecting on Thanksgiving with his Jewish-French-Irish-Chinese family including two adopted Chinese daughters:
Our Chinese children sit at the Passover table and scrounge for Easter eggs. They wear “South Side Irish” green scarves around their necks on St. Patrick’s Day. It’s all in the family.
My wife came home one day from our daughters’ Chinese culture class to announce there would be no class next week. “Because of the Jewish holidays,” she explained, straight-faced. Only in America. Our girls speak French, like their mother. My wife and I join our girls to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in Mandarin. We’ve learned that families mixed by marriage or adoption don’t shrink or starve a heritage. They nourish it with newcomers.
Happy Thanksgiving. 感恩节快乐！
With all the many new Chinese immersion schools opening around the country, this report from the Washington Post reminds us that not all such programs are a success.
I’ve been negligent about updating this site and so have missed out on some cool new resources and websites that have popped up in recent weeks. I just by chance discovered this website, Panda Paws, that sells products for bilingual learning. It’s run by two Chinese-American moms who say they personally select everything they sell according to what their children like. They also write a blog.
Another new blog by a mom also covers topics related to raising bilingual Chinese-English kids in the U.S., apparently also here in the SF Bay Area. I look forward to reading more from her. And I’ll try to do a better job keeping up with all the great new resources out there.
Read the rest of this entry »
The gloomy economy is not stopping parents living abroad from investing in International Schools, the New York Times reports. In China alone, the numbers are remarkable:
In China, international school enrollments rose to 104,717 students in May from 91,807 a year earlier and just 7,268 nine years ago.
Read the full article here.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Chinese language schools are popping up all over the place. When I was growing up in Western Massachusetts, we barely had a Chinese restaurant in town, much less a Chinese immersion school, like the town of Hadley now does. M and MX found a local news video about the school:
