This was a really interesting article. Thanks for sharing.
Best wishes
Marcus Reoch
Dragons in Europe
From: Mandarin Chinese Teaching [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dawna Leung
Sent: 13 June 2013 21:42
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Times article on Chinese language immersion
Thank you for this- it's great- and so inspiring! Good luck and well done for making immersion happen jn the UK!
Dawna Leung
Mandarin Stars
8437 2498
On 13/06/2013, at 11:02 PM, Qingwei <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Dear all,
I'm pleased to share with you a recent Times article on language immersion at Bohunt School. The article highlights the benefits for immersion students in subjects across the board, and Bohunt’s exciting plans for Mandarin immersion.
Best wishes,
Qingwei Li
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Foreign language immersion is on the curriculum for pioneering schools
Last night, I accidentally said to my mum, ‘Can you just arrêt?’” RICHARD POHLE/THE TIMES
Published at 12:01AM, June 12 2013
A state school has started teaching maths in Chinese and PE in French. Welcome to the world of language immersion
The man at the front of the classroom is gesticulating wildly. He seems to be trying to teach us a fiendishly hard computer program. But, even though this is a British state secondary school, he is rabbiting on about it in French. No wonder I don’t understand a word he’s saying: it’s like gobbledygook squared. Every time he says, “Trois-D” and jabbers at some animated objects on screen, my head hurts. At least I’m not in the other class: they will be taught all this in Mandarin. Is this a scene from an anxiety dream? No, it’s the new trend for language immersion that has swept aspirational America and has now arrived at a school in the UK.
“Sometimes,” says Connor, a 12-year-old boy to my left, “I speak so much French at school, I can’t get it out of my head. Last night, I accidentally said to my mum, ‘Can you just arrêt?’”
I know how he feels. Just half an hour of hearing my young classmates advising each other to “cliquer à gauche” in this Information and Communications Technology (ICT) lesson is enough to confuse me. I can’t imagine that I could do anything other than flounder and fail at computer programming if taught in a second language. For the next five years, Connor and his friends at Bohunt School in Hampshire will not only have traditional French lessons, but be expected to conduct ICT, art, PE, their after-school activities, social studies and discussing school news, all in French. Children in other classes have a similar immersion programme — taught regular GCSE courses such as history and science — in Spanish; and next term the school will become the first in the UK to offer Mandarin immersion.
This school is pioneering its Mandarin immersion for the new 11-year-olds starting in September, and is now in a process of readying themselves with native Chinese teachers and all the right materials, so, for example, pupils can learn table tennis just as if they were in Beijing. The school does not have enough resources for parents to choose which language immersion programme they would like their child to start in; instead, each year for new joiners it offers one of French, Spanish, and now Chinese. Those in the immersion programme stay with the same language until they finish school at 16 (pupils can opt out, but no one has so far). This means the 11-year-olds starting their Mandarin immersion in September will emerge at 16 speaking it, writing it and with an A level in it.
So what on earth is the school thinking, jeopardising these children’s academic progress in normal subjects for the sake of some crazed linguistic extremism? Everyone speaks English! No need to complicate things by doing quadratic equations in Chinese. The answer lies in an unexpected paradox: the children put in the immersion programme actually do better in all subjects. They do better in languages, of course, but the surprising result is that they do better when they are assessed in other subjects too, despite being taught a third of the time in a second language.
This applies to all pupils in the programme, no matter what their ability. So, for example, after two years in the Spanish immersion programme, the Year 8 pupils are performing a year and a half ahead of their peers in Spanish. Sure. But they are also performing a year ahead of their peers in English and maths. Making things harder for the children and the teachers seems to make other things easier. How?
“You might expect children’s progress to suffer, in say, ICT, when they are taught in a second language but they have to be tested in English. Or you would think a subject like English, which they are, of course, taught in English, would be unaffected,” says Neil Strowger, Bohunt’s headmaster.
“Actually the reverse is the case. The immersion experience somehow helps their other subjects whether they are taught in a foreign language or not. We think it’s because it’s hard: keeping going when things are tough, supporting each other, having to strain to listen and understand. To be honest, we brought in immersion not to improve results in languages. It was to challenge children, to say to them, you will find this difficult. They rise to it.”
The results at Bohunt are not a one-off. Although the school is a rarity in this country in its commitment to immersion, the phenomenon has been exhaustively studied in North America. There, the immersion story is like that of the American Dream itself: it started with the poor immigrants and ended with the richest of the rich.
Back in the 1980s, America had large-scale immigration from South and Central America. Well-meaning educators deemed it kind to offer the Spanish-speaking children a bilingual education. However, administrations led by George W. Bush all but stamped it out, arguing that it was multiculturalism gone mad, trapping poor kids in a Spanish ghetto. Beginning at the turn of the millennium, state after state passed laws banning bilingual education.
But then something interesting happened. Research began to come through showing that bilingual education didn’t harm children. Far from it, it could increase all kinds of attainment in a mysterious way, possibly by exercising the brain harder. For example, Canadian studies of the bilingual elderly showed that facility staved off dementia by a few years. Numerous studies of bilingual programmes showed that, at the very least, other subjects didn’t suffer; at the very best it produced bilingual children with magically better grades in all kinds of subjects. Middle-classes suddenly clamoured to get in. The mix reversed: bilingual programmes were to teach Spanish to English-speakers, not the other way round.
Aspirational Spanish-speaking children queued up for a place alongside the most pushy of wealthy, white, English-speaking parents. The explosion of interest has been dramatic. One academic estimated that dual-language immersion programmes have gone from a few hundred, less than five years ago, up to 1,000 across the US. Texas and California are leading the way with Spanish-speaking programmes because of their huge Spanish-speaking populations, but what of a state like Utah? In 2000, it banned bilingual education, but performed an about-turn in 2008. State leaders spotted that bilingual education was just what was needed to attract international investment, especially from China.
Now nearly half of its school districts offer programmes in which primary school children get 50 per cent of their learning in a foreign language. There are 14,000 children currently enrolled, and 20,000 new students signed up for next year. In the current school year, 24 new Mandarin immersion schools began in the US, an exponential growth on years before. More than a third of the the new Mandarin schools are in Utah. Avenues in Manhattan, a luxurious new school that has just opened for the world’s super-rich (the New York Timesheadline was “The Best School $75 Million Can Buy”), is offering a Mandarin immersion programme. Parents would demand nothing less.
I spoke to Fred Genesee, a psychology professor at McGill University in Canada and an expert in bilingual teaching. If, I said, bilingual education is so good, why isn’t everyone doing it?
“It is value-added education,” he said. “But many schools lack the resources, especially teachers who are sufficiently proficient in the second language to teach academic subjects in that language. Also, some schools may not do it as there is a fear — a myth really — that teaching in a language that the kids aren’t proficient in puts them at risk. That’s not the case, at least not for students who already speak the dominant language of the society in which they live and thus have lots of exposure to it outside school.”
But, I say, it seems like the debate has been won, in North America at least.
“It’s popular here in Canada, about 10 per cent of the school-age population is in French immersion, and there is much greater demand. But schools are not expanding. One of the handicaps of being English-speaking is that you think that because the rest of the world wants to learn English, you think you do not have to learn another language. The problem is that all of the folks around the world who are learning English as a second language retain their home languages — Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, and so on. As a result, monolingual English graduates will be competing with bilingual English-Spanish/Chinese graduates.”
Back to Hampshire. Neil Strowger took over the school four years ago. As a modern languages graduate, the only time he got to grips with French was when he spent a year in France. His deputy Phil Avery’s only experience of Spanish was his five months as a barman on a Mediterranean beach. Forty minutes bent over a textbook, conjugating verbs, isn’t enough. It also doesn’t bring you the practical vocabulary you get from, say, arguing with the referee in French when playing football.
When they offered their first immersion year, they had no idea how popular it would be. Only 26 pupils are allowed to do it each year, since they have a limited number of teachers qualified to teach languages and a second subject. More than 80, much of the rest of the year group, were turned away. As a comprehensive school they select a mixed ability group.
Resources are the big hurdle: for instance, the French ICT class that I attended was staffed by two teachers. The ICT teacher took a back-seat, preparing the information for Frank Frangeskou, the French teacher who has translated all her slides into French before the lesson began. He then led the class, with her support when things got technical. The French teacher did lead PE and a few other subjects on his own.
I hear the children muttering to each other in a “Franglais” mix of English and French, which after two terms of instruction I find pretty impressive.
“If they don’t understand, I just keep going until they do,” Frangeskou said. “Sometimes that can mean I do some pretty extreme mime. But language is a pattern, once they start learning to listen for pattern, it helps their maths and their music.”
I keep asking the children if they get baffled. They say the first time was rough, and they still have patches where they haven’t a clue. But they don’t mind. They’re trained to pick out key words, and just let the rest soak in.
Come September, Qingwei Li, the qualified maths and Mandarin teacher, will be leading them in lots of subjects, all in Mandarin. She’s already excited about Chinese PE: learning table tennis in Mandarin, and Chinese chess, one of the most popular board games in the world. As in other immersion groups, the pupils will take the GCSE in their foreign language two years early, in Year 9, and the A level two years early, at 16.
Bohunt School is now an outstanding academy with some of the top results for comprehensives in the UK. Strowger says immersion has driven that success, but it’s a bold and strenuous change. Fewer than a handful of schools in Britain, mostly primaries, have considered following Bohunt’s lead. I think back to Utah and their plan to teach a generation of children Chinese, so that they can greet their lords and masters once China takes over the world.