Reply to Yu Ying - Do/Can Non-Native Kids Actually SPEAK Chinese?

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to " Yu Ying - Do/Can Non-Native Kids Actually SPEAK Chinese?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Hi from Hong Kong where our kids attend an American-curriculum international school with daily Mandarin (despite Hong Kong being a predominantly Cantonese speaking city). Thought I’d mention some of our experiences as they may be relevant.

Kids have daily Chinese lessons at our school and are divided into two sections: “Mandarin near native (MNN)” speakers and "Mandarin as a second language(MSL)“. Mandarin is required from K-4 through Grade 5, and after that becomes an elective class. As the kids get into high school they are streamed into different sections of MNN or MSL or 1-2-3-4-5 (and higher for the MNN). MNN kids are predominantly two-parent Mandarin or Cantonese speaking households or one-parent Mandarin speaking (with outside tutors) and MSL are two-parent English speakers.

The “average” kids in the Native Speaker stream (MNN 3) are considered ready for AP Mandarin tests as early as their freshman year in high school, though they usually take the test much later. The MSL kids in the top two streams also have a very high pass rate for the AP Mandarin test, though they usually don’t get to that level of proficiency until their Junior or Senior years. I don’t know if AP Mandarin would be considered ‘fluency’ but it’s a baseline that might compare with Yu Ying once they get to that level.

Anecdotally, there was a family who was in Hong Kong for four years and they just moved to the American School in Paris. I asked them the other day how the switch was going from Mandarin to French and they said “we’ve learned more French in one year than we did with four years of Mandarin”.  I asked if why and they said “With French they can just ‘sound it out’ if they don’t quite get it, and many of the words are similar enough to English spellings that they can get the gist. With Mandarin it is binary—right or wrong—you get it or you are just staring at the page clueless. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics