Reply to Chinese "immersion" outside of school hours

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][/quote]
I do wish I had your crystal ball. It's so great that you can tell the future of DCI and all of its college admissions, ever, even though it's oldest students are only in ninth grade and there are two other tracks in addition to Chinese. And that it all could be miraculously fixed if YY would drop all of its other priorities and fight tooth and nail to get the tiny number of elementary aged native Cantonese speakers who live in DC to attend. Hire new administrators! Get Congress to change DC charter laws! Develop special curricula to support Cantonese speakers to transition to Mandarin! It's all so simple, why don't you idiots just listen to me![/quote]

This post isn't reasonable.

*Congress wouldn't need to change DC charter laws to give preference to native speakers at immersion charters, at least to replace drop-outs.  This is a common misconception. All that would need to change would be the LEA arrangement for individual charters. This is a change the DC City Council could effect if DCPC pushed for it.  DCPC isn't motivated to push for the change because they haven't been asked to by a coalition of charter immersion parent associations and admins.  But DCPC will almost certainly make this change eventually, even if the schools don't ask for it.  This is because running large charter immersion programs with a handful of native speakers is too far from best practice in North American K-8 school immersion language instruction to be sustainable.

*DCPC could require immersion charter school boards to hire principals fluent in the language of instruction. No real controversy there. No language immersion charter but YY has hired a principal without a command of the language of immersion, let alone fluency. Principals routinely move on after a decade, or less, on the job. YY's will go eventually, and be replaced by a fluent Mandarin speaker.

*Dialect transition support is standard at Mandarin immersion schools around the country.  See web sites of those in Cal, NC and NY to gain insight.  No development of special curricula needed, only a single staff member with background in dialect transition support to implement the system, drawing native speakers to the program.

*Running language immersion charters where native speaking kids are a tiny fraction of the school population (probably 1% at YY) is a practice worth working to end.  A large corpus of academic literature supports dual-immersion, and, by extension, any baby steps taken to move in that direction.

But don't listen to me, consider doing more research.

[/quote]

One ponders all those Chinese students learning English in their schools, and it is obvious that immersion does not have to be dual to work.  Is it the best model?  Possibly.  Is it the only effective model?  Obviously not.  [u]Obviously. not.[/u]  The world is managing to learn English without us having to insert ourselves into their schools.  We can pull off the reverse right here in DC.[/quote]

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