Chinese Language in Public Schools
It’s unusual for traditional public schools to teach languages through full-time immersion, but some are trying to jazz up their language departments with a wider variety of language courses. Today, Valerie Schremp Hahn of The Grade blogs about Chinese language teaching in Bowling Green and Clayton. I’m curious where the Chinese teacher got this number:
Wu Williams, who is the type of person to bubble with enthusiasm over most anything she does, was especially excited about today’s visit. She told the students that by the year 2015, about 750,000 high school students will be taking Chinese language courses.
Whatever the exact statistics, interest in teaching Asian languages is definitely increasing. For more on schools and languages, see my op-ed about languages in charter schools.
Clayton does a mixture. My dad went to Concordia Seminary when I was in 8th and 9th grade and we lived on the campus so I was lucky enough to get to attend Clayton my freshman year. We all had to take foreign language classes and the classes were a mixture of immersion and what you normally see in a school. By this I mean we had textbooks but they tended to be less about grammar and more about pictures related to words and then English phonetic pronunciations of the words at least for the first 2 years, 3rd years learning to write looked more like “normal” language classes. We had to speak in the language we were taking in class at least to the extent of our knowledge- if we said something in English that you were supposed to be able to say by then in you were reprimanded and could lose points. I was taking Latin and found it hilarious that we had to speak a dead language. :)
Comment by S/A — April 27, 2009 @ 8:52 p.m.