Reply to Bilingual Kids in Language Immersion ES Programs, Which Programs Have Many & Strive to Attract Them?

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Reply to "Bilingual Kids in Language Immersion ES Programs, Which Programs Have Many & Strive to Attract Them?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I think you are mistaken to think that YY focuses on any Chinese at all....It aspires to catch DC's growing ranks of middle-class parents who want decent schooling for their kids.  Currently bilingualism is a fashionable trend in the concept of decent schooling. That this language is Mandarin is irrelevant. It may as well be Portuguese...[/quote]

Ten years ago, the Dept. of Ed commissioned a comprehensive study of dual immersion language program outputs in public schools nation-wide, done by the Center for Applied Linguistics. [b] The researchers concluded that 50/50 dual immersion outputs are superior to one-way immersion, at least when ES students arrive with a firm grounding in English. [/b] The study report talks about how peer-provided cultural inputs are as important as language inputs in motivating children to continue with language study later.  http://www.csos.jhu.edu/crespar/techReports/Report63.pdf

If what you say is true, PP, if the aim of language immersion is simply to catch DC's growing ranks of middle-class parents, with  target languages used being irrelevant, why would DC staunchly reject educational best practices in pursuit of this goal?  Why would the District ignore the research when setting admissions policies for most of its immersion schools?  It's one thing to strive to create dual immersion programs and fail, perhaps because there aren't enough speakers of a target language with young children in a school district, another to set out to do what research has shown doesn't work very well.

If LAMB burns for its lottery law-breaking, maybe its school community members should go down brandishing the report at the Dept. of Ed. 
[/quote]

Even if it's true, the rest of the world learns English through one-way immersion.  One of my best friends in college was from Shanghai and spoke perfect, flawless English - better than mine and I was raised here.  Well enough to attend an Ivy League college as an undergrad and she had never been outside China until then.  If my kid at YY, learns Mandarin half as well, I'll be happy.[/quote]

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