Reply to Fairfax Adding Foreign Language in the Elementary Schools (FLES)?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]^Or should we just give up now if we can devote only 1-2 hours per week to learning the language and are not likely to ever live in China?[/quote]

PP here.  Exposure to a language at a young age is always good, obviously, particularly if your child takes to it. The problem I see with the 1-2 hour after or before school programs is that there is often no context for Chinese.  Kids hear Spanish spoken all over the place; less so Mandarin so there's less opportunity to use it and that's the key to developing the accent, pronunciation.  When we moved back here I enrolled my kids in Hope Language Schools, where Chinese American kids study the language on weekends at local high schools. But even my kids, who had been studying Chinese daily for three years, balked. The challenge there is that with the exception of a general beginners class taught for English speakers, the classes are taught in Chinese and the other kids have native Chinese-speaker parents.  The classes are also very formally structured for rote learning, not fun, so my 5 year old -- who learned to speak English and Chinese at the same time -- did not take to it at all.  We switched my older son to the English/Chinese class, but at the time (which was now a number of years ago, so things may have changed), but at that time the class was made up of everyone from adults and parents who had adopted a Chinese orphan to sullen Chinese-American teenagers who hadn't done well enough in the Chinese classes to advance, but were still required to take lessons by their parents.   As I said, things may have changed so it's worth looking into, because it is a great community where you are surrounded by native Chinese speakers, but again, probably for older children, unless you have a child who loves to sit in class on weekends.

You can check it out here: http://www.hopechinese.org/board/

I have heard more positive things about the Chinese programs that are incorporated into the school curriculum like at Wolftrap Elementary in Vienna.  It feeds into Kilmer MS which offers Chinese in 8th and then kids have the option of continuing Mandarin at Marshall High School, so at least there is some continuity if your child likes Chinese.  And who's to say they won't ever live in China?  Perhaps not as a young child, but if they keep at Chinese they could go there to study it as a college or even high school student.  Either way, they'll have a big leg up on me.  I'd never studied Chinese before moving to Beijing and still learned to speak it fairly well in my 40s. It can be done.  :)

[/quote]

Thank you so much for this response! Our kids are taking Mandarin through Language Stars now and having fun, but I see a gap coming up as they age out of that and may not have any class until high school, so I'm happy to have the information about Hope and will check it out. The FCPS high schools at least seem to offer a much better range of classes than middle schools, which seem to have more Japanese than Chinese. I wonder if the middle school offerings will change to better match the elementary school programs like Chinese FLES and FLEX, although of course the ES immersion program does offer Japanese rather than Chinese.

To the PP critical of the sound of Chinese (not sure if referring to Mandarin or Cantonese or both) and of China. I don't disagree that improvements could be made in many areas of policy, but the reality is that Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world (two to three times the number of English or Spanish speakers), and China is largest foreign holder of American debt. I see friends beginning to need to travel to China for their jobs. I don't think that the importance of this country can be ignored. [/quote]

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