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

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[quote=Anonymous]I'm a Canadian academic researcher who studies education reform, mainly looking at the effectiveness of secondary programs in my country. If only it were true that the the pay off can be negligible or even negative is not supported by any evidence.

In fact, there is a sizeable corpus of academic literature, mainly contributed by Canadian and Nordic commentators in the last 20 years, proving that language immersion done poorly (via one-way immersion, and/or immersion ending before age 12 or 13) does indeed set students back in the dominant language. The new research has prompted our provincial governments, particularly Quebec, to alter modes of delivery of public language immersion products.

Since the mid 1990s, Canada has largely stopped offering YuYing style "50% immersion in target language" to families unable to support immersion at home, with at least one adult in the home speaking the target language well. As a result, more and more Canadian schools offers public immersion programs (dual or two-way immersion) only admitting children with at least one native speaker in the home, along with more second tier programs offering about 25% immersion in the language to others.

What we've found in Canada is that 50% one-way immersion disadvantages students from monolingual families on university admissions examinations given in English. I am aware that the strongest public K-8 American immersion and partial immersion program, mainly found in county and municipal school systems in California, North Carolina, Utah and New York, have heeded the relevant research in developing their immersion programs. I don't know the DC politics of education reform well enough to know why DCPC has not followed suit.[/quote]

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