Three Delaware school districts will use “immersion programs” to introduce kindergarten students to foreign languages this fall, but it’s not a sink-or-swim proposition.
Rather, it’s the start of an extended journey toward passing Advanced Placement exams for college credit in Mandarin Chinese or Spanish by the time students are in ninth grade, and speaking the languages at an advanced level by their senior year of high school, said Gregory Fulkerson, education associate for world languages and international education at the Delaware Department of Education.
The Caesar Rodney School District will offer instruction in Chinese, while the Red Clay and Indian River Districts will offer instruction in Spanish. The Colonial School District is considering adding a Chinese immersion program, but will not do so this year.
The programs are the first steps in the Governor’s World Language Expansion Initiative, a plan developed by the Markell administration to equip Delaware students with the language skills needed to compete in a global economy. “By 2020, we hope to have 20 fully functioning immersion programs in Chinese and Spanish in the state,” Fulkerson said.
“All the research points to the earlier you start a language, the easier it is to learn,” said J. Scott Lykens, director of instruction in the Caesar Rodney School District. “Short of living in that culture in that land, immersion is the next best way to learn.”
To support the development of Chinese language programs, Delaware has joined the Chinese Language Education Consortium, a collaboration of education agencies in Utah, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Delaware, and four higher education institutions, Brigham Young University, Arizona State University, the University of Mississippi and Hunter College. The consortium, with Brigham Young and the Utah State Office of Education taking the lead roles, is working to create, implement and disseminate a K-12 curriculum for Chinese language study.
“When Gov. Markell went to look for a sustainable model [program], he turned to the other states, and he found that Utah already had a sustainable model,” Fulkerson said. “The Utah model can be adopted by any district that wants to use it.”
The new Chinese program is already drawing a strong response in Caesar Rodney, where more than 300 families of incoming kindergarten students have expressed interest in the program, Lykens said. About 500 students a year enter kindergarten in Caesar Rodney, he said.
“We expected a pretty good response, but I didn’t think it would be 300,” Lykens said.
The program will be able to serve about 100 students, and a lottery will be held if more than 100 applications are filed, he said.
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Different districts, different approaches
In Caesar Rodney, and for the Spanish programs in Indian River and Red Clay, the districts will be using a “dual-immersion” system like the one now being used in Utah public schools.
“It’s absolutely amazing to see kindergarteners, after half a year, speaking Chinese fluently,” said Carlton Lampkins, Colonial’s assistant superintendent, who was among a group of Delaware educators who visited Utah in February to observe the state’s immersion programs.
In a dual-immersion program, each class has two teachers, with one providing a half-day of instruction in English and the other using the world language for the rest of the day.
In Caesar Rodney, Lykens said, a native Chinese teacher will teach science, math and Chinese literacy while an English-speaking teacher will handle English, language arts, social studies and “bridge lessons,” a sort of preview/review to make sure the students are picking up the concepts covered by the Chinese teacher.
Each year, the immersion programs will grow, with districts adding classes at the next grade level as the participants advance through the elementary and middle school grades, Fulkerson said.
The program should not require any additional staffing since each teacher will be working with the standard number of students in the morning and afternoon, Lykens said. As additional native Chinese teachers are needed each year, they will replace teachers who are retiring or leaving the district, he said.
The Chinese-language teachers are coming to Caesar Rodney through the Confucius Institute, a Chinese nonprofit organization that has already helped bring Chinese teachers to Alexis I. du Pont High School and the Conrad Schools of Science in the Red Clay District. The teachers receive training in U.S. teaching methods at UCLA and in Delaware before beginning their classroom assignments, Fulkerson said.
The Chinese teachers have one-year contracts with their districts and come to the United States on visas that are good for three years. “If they’re good teachers, we hope they stay for all three years,” Fulkerson said.
Fulkerson is in Spain this week, interviewing candidates for possible jobs in the Indian River and Red Clay immersion programs. Indian River is using an internet videoconferencing connection to participate in those interviews, said Audrey Carey, the district’s supervisor of elementary instruction. Hiring from Spain isn’t Indian River’s only option, she said. The district could also hire a teacher fluent in Spanish who is already in the area or who is graduating from a university in the region, she said.
“We want a teacher who is proficient in both English and Spanish, who has instructional background, strong proficiency and the ability to work as part of a team,” Carey said.
The immersion programs are the newest world language and international education initiatives in Delaware public schools, but they are not the only ones. The increased emphasis is understandable, since the state has added world languages to its high school graduation requirements. Starting with the Class of 2015, students must complete two years of study in a foreign language to receive a diploma.
Two high schools in the Red Clay district — A.I. du Pont and Conrad — began offering first-year Chinese classes last fall. The teachers at A.I. and Conrad are also serving as “conversation coaches” for students at the MOT Charter School and Dover Air Force Base Middle School who are taking a Chinese class online. The Caesar Rodney District hopes to add online Chinese and Spanish classes at all of its middle schools in the fall, Lykens said. Also, Caesar Rodney High School has added Arabic to its robust languages program, which includes Chinese, the venerable Latin and the traditional Spanish, French and German.
The state also recently renewed a memorandum of understanding with the French Académie de Créteil that provides for teacher exchanges and other partnerships. Through the agreement, a teacher from France, Fanny Valois, is teaching at A.I. du Pont High School this year. In addition, Fulkerson said, a physics class at William Penn High School is using the internet to connect with a physics class in France to solve problems.
“It’s bigger than just a French language program, and you don’t have to know French to take physics,” Fulkerson said. “It’s an opportunity to connect schools and to have students work with their counterparts in another country.”
