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| Federal Grants To Teach Elementary Students Chinese |
| 2006-06-22 |
Kindergartners in Mesa may soon be learning two alphabets: one English, the other Chinese. The federal government's push to get kids to learn tough languages for economic and national security reasons is inching down into primary and middle schools. In Arizona, several schools are beginning to respond to the new demands.• Mesa Unified School District will start Mandarin Chinese classes at Dobson High School in August. The district also applied for a new federal grant to begin teaching it in elementary schools. Federal officials are driving the effort by targeting nearly $23 million in grant money this year toward elementary schools, where primary students can begin the long road to fluency in difficult languages. The administration has requested five times that amount for next year, or $114 million. Officials are desperate to fill government jobs with Americans who know Mandarin as well as other "critical languages" such as Arabic and Farsi, Hindi and Russian. "This is a step up in federal efforts to ensure strong language education, beginning in the earliest grades," said Valerie Smith, U.S. Department of Education spokeswoman. In addition to grants, federal officials plan to offer incentives for critical-language teachers. In exchange for help with tuition, college graduates fluent in such languages would commit themselves to teaching in elementary and high schools for several years. It's a grand experiment in a country where less than half of high school students take a foreign language. About a dozen students are already signed up for Mandarin at Mesa's Dobson High. The district is applying for one of the first $300,000 federal grants to help establish a Mandarin program in surrounding elementary schools. If the grant is approved in September, classes could begin as early as January and start in kindergarten. Liana Clarkson, Mesa's world languages director, said finding Mandarin teachers in the Phoenix area is not a problem. "There is a large Chinese-American community out there, second and third generations," Clarkson said. For years, research has concluded that younger children learn new languages quickly. In 1989, the Arizona State Board of Education required foreign-language courses in all elementary schools. The state Legislature, however, never funded the mandate, and few schools responded. Some elementary schools offer Navajo or Spanish, but most do not. Scottsdale Basis has offered Mandarin for two years. Lee Padover, 13, tackled it this year in seventh grade. "Spanish and French would have been a little easier," Padover said. "I took Mandarin because it's a little bit of a challenge." Padover is a lover of maps, competed in the state geography bee for three years and has a fascination with cultures. In San Francisco's Chinatown, he startled his mother and a waiter by using his Mandarin in a restaurant. The waiter understood him but corrected his pronunciation. Padover said he hopes to continue in Mandarin until he is fluent. Phoenix Country Day School has a cultural exchange program with China. This year, the school received a $225,000 endowment to begin teaching Mandarin in the 2007-08 school year. The school isn't sure at what grade it will begin, but students at the school now begin learning Spanish before they begin kindergarten. Phoenix public schools are not teaching India's Hindi or Iran's Farsi, and only private Islamic schools are teaching courses in Arabic. Fawzia Tung, principal of Arizona Cultural Academy, a K-12 private school in Phoenix, said her main challenge is finding teachers. Many who are certified to teach can't speak Arabic well, and fluent speakers aren't always good teachers. She ended up hiring a consultant to train her teachers. Most high schools in Arizona cannot muster enough time and money to offer more than Spanish and French, sometimes German and, occasionally, Latin. Few students are interested in taking more than the two years of language required by most universities. Enrollment drops dramatically in the third or fourth years of any high school language course. A few districts have enough money to offer a critical language at one high school but rarely more than one, maybe two, at a time. Opening a new class often means closing another. Tempe Accelerated High School, a charter, offered Arabic two years ago to about a dozen students. But Principal Abelardo Batista said the class cost too much time and money, which he needed to help all students learn the basics. Pat Barrett, who plans to retire in a few years as Mesa's Russian teacher, called Mandarin "the new glamour language." "Languages go in fads," Barrett said. "Once the fad wears off, you find yourself sliding back to the basic three: Spanish, French and German." Emphasize the essential Chinese expressions: "Drop all weapons!", "Hands up!", "Halt or I'll shoot!", and the ever-popular, "Freeze, motherf*cker!" |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #10 Just make sure they can all pass a background check - and are interested in military things... Future NSA linguists. Heh |
| Posted by: Oldspook 2006-06-22 22:01 |
| #9 Darn it, bruce, is there nothing the Americans can't screw up! |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-06-22 18:41 |
| #8 One should note that the latitude florida is at it should be a desert but our geography makes us have convection thunderstorms,Florida winters are typicaly dry. |
| Posted by: bruce 2006-06-22 17:39 |
| #7 :-)~ |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-06-22 17:24 |
| #6 Ok, ok, fine....Swamp Blondie it is! Sheesh, what a tough crowd! ;) |
| Posted by: Swamp Blondie (formerly) Desert Blondie 2006-06-22 17:18 |
| #5 Don't worry, we're working on it. |
| Posted by: Halliburton Climatology Division 2006-06-22 16:06 |
| #4 yeah, for one thing, you live in Fla and call yourself "Desert Blondie"... ;-) |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-06-22 14:25 |
| #3 WG, as a graduate of Arizona's public schools (kindergarten through AZ State...go Sun Devils!!) there are some districts there that do an excellent job in teaching languages. My old district, Paradise Valley, isn't included in this grant, yet. But that's where I got my start learning Spanish, and yes, even some Russian (thanks Mrs Strunk, wherever you are.....and Mr Damore & Ms Quihuis, too!). The difference with foreign languages and English classes is basically the BS factor. English classes can and will make you sit through all kinds of crap that will not make you a better speaker or writer. However, it's pretty freakin' obvious if you know your French or not when you try to converse in it. Ironically enough, I got more and better grammar instruction in my foreign language courses than I ever did in my English courses. Those classes are the reason I don't sound like a completely ignorant git when I write (I might sound like an airhead, but that's a different problem). |
| Posted by: Desert Blondie 2006-06-22 13:35 |
| #2 It's a brilliiant idea. The best age at which to start learning a foreign language is before fourth grade, that is before reading skills are totally mastered. Once a child can read, language acquisition takes place in the reading part of the brain, not the talking part of the brain. Also, the older one is when he starts learning another language, the harder to speak without the pronounciation and lilt of his native tongue, that is without a perceptible accent. And Mandarin has the advantages of being about as far as possible from American English: it's tonal with five completely different words attaching to each syllable sequence depending on melody instead, the written language is made up of pictograms instead of letters, and the sense of time is very different (at least as far as I was able to grasp in the year I completely failed to master the language). Key is, once a second language -- any second language -- is mastered, all subsequent languages are easier to learn... including the primary one. And the earlier the brain pathways are set up, the better. What also pleases me is that it doesn't appear, in this article at least, that the federal grants are being used to force the littlest children in Arizona to learn Spanish. Either it's assumed they already know that language, or it hasn't occurred to them to teach the children the language of their invaders. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-06-22 13:33 |
| #1 My Gwad, they can't and won't teach effective English, what gives you any indication that those same teachers can handle Chinese? $23 million dollar NEA pork. When the dust settles in 50 years, the sober minds that write history are going to peg GW as a Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy Democrat. |
| Posted by: Whinetle Grush9406 2006-06-22 11:31 |