Anonymous wrote:What those handing out awards don't know, or perhaps care, is that YY kids try to speak English to their Chinese teachers about half the time. Our Chinese au pair discovered this when she recently volunteered in an upper grades YY class for several days straight.
The teachers from China do their best to force them to speak Mandarin in Chinese class, but it's a tough sell with only 1 or 2 fully bilingual native-speaking kids per grade. Yea, per grade, not per class.
My observation has been that they only try to speak English when they haven't yet learned the Chinese. The PreK class already speaks Chinese during their lunch hour. I've heard that in 2nd grade they speak Chinese all the time on their Chinese days, even lunch and recess but don't know yet from experience.
Something quite impressive is that not only did YY teachers and administrators attend the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Annual Convention and World Languages Expo (
http://www.actfl.org/conventions/2012-annual-convention-and-world-languages-expo), but YY was invited to present several lectures.
Additionally, the Head of School traveled to China at the invitation of Hanban (
http://english.hanban.org/) (the Confucius Institute) to evaluate potential sister schools and explore further opportunities for YY students to study abroad.
Evidently these experts on both foreign language instruction, and on China, know what they like when they see it!
http://washingtonyuying.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=270%3Aadministration-and-faculty-involved-in-outreach-around-the-world&catid=27&Itemid=29&lang=en