The success of a Chinese-immersion program at an elementary school in Maryland suggests a growing interest in Mandarin in the US.
Pleased parents of students at Potomac Elementary School's Chinese Immersion Program in Potomac, Maryland, turned out in full force at the school's Lunar New Year party this week to hear their little ones give speeches and recite poems in Chinese, even though some of the parents in attendance didn't speak any Mandarin.
The immersion program, which began at the school in 1995, is offered from kindergarten through fifth grade and uses Mandarin and English as the languages of instruction.
The program now has 153 students and a middle school and a high school in Potomac are considering adding Chinese-language immersion programs. If that's the case, Maryland will become the first state in the US where bilingual Mandarin-English education is available from the kindergarten to the high school level.
At this week's Lunar New Year party, the school looked as if it could have been located in Taiwan, Hong Kong or China. The gymnasium was adorned with red New Year's couplets and a large mural of horses by the students hung in the center of the gym to welcome the Year of the Horse.
As the number of Taiwanese and Chinese immigrants to Maryland has grown in recent years, many native Mandarin speakers have sent their their children to Sunday morning "Chinese schools" so that their children might learn the language of their parents and grandparents.
With the opening of the immersion program at Potomac Elementary, however, some ethnic Chinese parents have decided to send their children to the full-time program instead of relying on the Sunday-morning classes so that their children can be exposed to Mandarin five days a week.
Meanwhile, a growing awareness in the US that China is an emerging global power and that an understanding of Mandarin and of Chinese culture could be a valuable job skill prompted many non-ethnically Chinese parents to push for the program's creation.
Currently, there are four Mandarin teachers at the school. Two are from Taiwan and the other two are from China.
Students are taught complex Chinese characters and the Hanyu Pinyin phoneticization system (
To maintain the Immersion Program, the elementary school established education, translation and extracurricular Divisions to help organize textbook materials. Also, volunteers from many local non-profit Taiwanese and Chinese associations and organizations also help organize related activities for Mandarin education purposes.
A Taiwanese parent said that the students in the program have very good listening comprehension skills in Mandarin because of the fact that even courses like math and social studies are in Chinese. But the parent said that the students' reading and writing isn't as good as that of children who attend Sunday-morning Chinese-language classes.
Some Chinese-American parents prefer to send their children to Sunday Mandarin programs because they want their kids to learn the National Phonetic Symbols instead of the Hanyu Pinyin.
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