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

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[quote=Anonymous][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 [b]predominantly two-parent Mandarin or Cantonese speaking households or one-parent Mandarin speaking (with outside tutors) and MSL are two-parent English speakers. 
[/b]
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]

Thanks a lot for this contribution. I've never spoken to a YY parent or admin who has a good feel for the dialect nexus your intl school builds on. Few understand that DC dialect-speaking households are an accessible resource for Mandarin instruction. On the YY parent organization, I once advocated for a pay to play after-school Mandarin immersion program dialect-speaking DC kids would have free access to (with a view to raising speaking standards for all), but there wasn't any interest.

We're dialect speakers who gave up on YY because although it was a happy school, nobody in charge was connecting the spoken Chinese foundational dots. At our kids' weekend Cantonese program in MD, students transition from Cantonese to Mandarin through the MS grades. Grads generally go on to score high on AP Mandarin before senior year in HS, and/or Higher Level IB Diploma Chinese (with 6s or 7s) junior or senior year. This is the course sequencing you're laying out from 12,000 miles away.

Without a MNN type track here in DC public, I can't see how a serious Chinese studies program could emerge at DCI. The school could only support such a track if they made a point of trying to attract and retain native speaking peers, or at least to involve them somehow outside their lottery limitations.[/quote]

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