It’s only their second morning of summer camp, but more than a dozen students who will be entering kindergarten at Downes Elementary School in Newark already know the days of the week and body parts, and songs about pandas, snakes, horses and grasshoppers — in Mandarin Chinese.
The youngsters in the two-week program, known as the STARTALK Summer Student Camp and funded by a grant from an office in the U.S. Department of Defense, are getting a head start on how they will experience the first years of their school careers, participating in a Chinese language immersion program in which they will receive half of their lessons in English and half in Chinese.
Downes will be the first school in northern Delaware to launch a Chinese immersion program this fall, Principal Trish Prettyman said. A similar program began last fall at the McIlvane Early Childhood Center in Magnolia, part of the Caesar Rodney School District.
“Students entering the workforce able to speak a second language have a significant economic advantage and are better prepared for the global community” that they will enter as adults, and Mandarin Chinese ranks first after English in the international marketplace, Prettyman said after Gov. Jack Markell, parents and other observers watched the kindergartners demonstrate some of their new skills Tuesday.
The summer camp features lots of songs, gestures and movement, said Lynn Fulton Archer, an immersion specialist with the state Department of Education. “These activities help the children make connections to the words more quickly,” she said.
At Markell’s urging, the Department of Education developed the language immersion program, and kicked it off last year with 340 students in kindergarten and first grade receiving instruction in Mandarin Chinese at McIlvane and in Spanish at Lewis Elementary in Wilmington and Clayton Elementary in Frankford.
In the coming school year, with the addition of Chinese at Downes and Spanish at five other schools throughout the state, enrollment in immersion programs will approach 1,000 students. Pulaski Elementary in Christina School District, South Dover Elementary in the Capital School District, Indian River's East Millsboro Elementary and West Seaford and Blades Elementary in the Seaford School district are adding Spanish immersion.
The goals, Markell said, are to have 20 programs running by 2015, and to reach 10,000 students within 10 years.
By the end of fourth grade the participating students will be expected to speak proficiently in their foreign language. In middle school, they will take honors-level language classes and participate in projects with their peers in other countries. By the end of ninth grade, they should be able to pass Advanced Placement exams in the language they are studying.
“By the time these kids are 20 years old, the world of opportunities that will be available to them is huge,” Markell said.
The program appeals to parent Rachel Rodriguez, who enrolled her 5-year-old son, Ian, at Downes so he can learn Chinese. “It will be good for him, for college and his education, for employment opportunities, even if he doesn’t do anything with it long-term, just the amount of opportunities,” she said.
“If he can learn a completely different alphabet, it’s a little more challenging …. Once he gets that down he can always learn other languages,” she added. “We’re not going to get this opportunity again. I know I can’t do it on my own.”
Another parent, Rebecca Kalmbach, said she and her husband, Michael, are purchasing a house near Downes so their 5-year-old, Thurman, can enroll in the program. “There will be a lot of opportunities for him,” said Kalmbach, a foreign language teacher at Appoquinimink High School in Middletown. “Mandarin Chinese will be the language to know for the next generation.”
To prepare for the eventual introduction of the immersion programs at the middle school level, the Christina School District will begin offering online instruction in Chinese at Shue Medill Middle School and in Spanish at Bayard Middle School to small groups of students this fall, said Judi Coffield, the district’s director of curriculum and professional development. Downes students feed into Shue Medill and students at Pulaski Elementary, where a Spanish immersion program will begin this year, feed into Bayard, she said.
As the immersion program grows, it is designed to be self-sustaining financially, Archer said. A designated line in the Department of Education budget ($1,938,900 this year, according to Markell’s office) helps the districts purchase instructional materials for the first year the program is offered at each grade level, as well as with teacher training and recruitment costs, she said.
Special training is required for the teachers because they work in pairs, with one providing instruction in English and the other in Chinese or Spanish for two groups of 20 to 25 students, but they must coordinate their lesson plans.
Teacher salaries are paid through a combination of state and local funds, the same as other teachers, she added.
Other languages may eventually be added to the immersion program, Markell and Archer said.
To do so, Archer said, there would have to be sufficient interest (40 to 50 students) at a minimum of three schools and a potential long-term economic development benefit to the state.
Ultimately, she said, the growth of the program will rest in the hands of parents. “If they don’t have the belief that the language is going to be good for their children,” she said, “then it’s probably not going to be a good fit.”
