[audio:http://www.wdde.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/aidupontlanguage.mp3|titles= Delaware Public Media visits A.I du Pont High School's Chinese language class.]
To the untrained ear, the sounds are virtually impossible to decipher, but the ninth-grade students are starting to figure it out.
In their classroom at Alexis I. du Pont High School in Greenville, they’re holding small cards with the picture of a person at work and two lines of text, one a series of Chinese characters and the other a phonetic pronunciation in English.
One student asks, in Chinese, “What are you doing?” Others respond, in Chinese, “I am a police officer,” “I am a scientist,” “I am a soldier.”
They are taking their first steps in learning the language spoken in the world’s most populous nation.
By the end of their first year, teacher Rosalind Chang says, students “will be able to give a monologue —introduce themselves, give their age and birthday, describe their family and say what they like to do.”
Stick with the program for four years, she says, and they will be able to look up information on Chinese language websites and talk about the weather, going shopping and modes of transportation. “And, if they went to China,” she says, “they could survive, they could make friends. They would find their way around.”
What’s going on at A.I. du Pont is a part of a small but significant revolution in world language instruction in Delaware public schools. In high school, and even in kindergarten, learning Chinese is becoming an option for students who relish challenges and dream of careers that could find them circling the globe.
Immersion programs, starting in kindergarten, are now up and running in two school districts, with another to start next fall in a third district.. In addition to A.I. du Pont, high schools offering Chinese instruction include Sussex Tech, Caesar Rodney and the Conrad Schools of Science. In addition, several junior high schools have added online Chinese classes offered through Middlebury Interactive Languages, a joint venture between Middlebury College in Vermont and K12 Inc., a provider of individualized learning approaches.
“Sometimes parents are a little trepidacious when they hear their child wants to take Chinese. It’s something they have no experience with,” says Judith Conway, supervisor of unified arts for the Red Clay Consolidated School District, which includes A.I. du Pont and Conrad. “But two weeks into class, the children are speaking Chinese… and they’re very impressed.”
A.I. du Pont and Conrad began their Chinese programs in the 2011-12 school year, as part of an affiliation with a Chinese nonprofit organization called Hanban (its full name is the Chinese Language Council International) and the College Board. Grants awarded by the College Board covered many of the costs associated with hiring native Chinese teachers, books and other startup costs. That grant lasted three years. Red Clay schools are now picking up the costs of the Chinese program out of their own budgets, according to Kevin Palladinetti, the A.I. du Pont principal.
More Coverage: Language instruction options growing in Delaware schools
Conrad now has 85 students taking Chinese, including 13 from the program’s first class.
More than 75 students are enrolled in Chinese classes at A.I. du Pont, Palladinetti says, and some of them have enrolled at the school through the state’s choice program because they want to learn the language.
One of those students is sophomore Jake Borns, who began taking Chinese while in middle school at Conrad and has decided that he wants a career as a translator.
“At Conrad, I had to take a language, and I decided I’d give myself a little challenge,” he says. “The first year, it was not easy. There’s no alphabet, just characters. And the pronunciation … it’s all hard, but it gets easier.”
Borns is fluent enough with the language to surprise the servers when he visits a Chinese restaurant. “I’ll say hello in English, and then I’ll order in Chinese,” he says. “It leaves them speechless.”
Interest in Chinese is growing throughout the school, partly because of the Chinese Club, an after-school activity that exposes students to Chinese culture, food and social life, Palladinetti says.
And, he says, given China’s growing stature in the global economy, the school hopes in the few years to develop cross-curricular links between its business marketing and Chinese classes.
Some of that is already going on at Sussex Technical High School, where Chinese is now being offered for a second year. “We follow the state’s curriculum expectations, but we try to bring career aspects into some class activities,” says Kevin Dickerson, director of support services for the Sussex Technical School District.
“China is known for its strength in engineering and technology,” says John Demby, Sussex Tech principal. “Knowing the language will help our students be competitive in these fields.”
Sussex Tech also received its Chinese teacher through the Hanban program, but she is returning to China at the end of the school year. The school hopes to find another teacher for next year and add third-year and fourth-year Chinese to its course offerings, Demby says.
While the goal for students taking Chinese in high school is to achieve fluency by the time they graduate, younger students in several Delaware schools are aiming even higher.
The dual-language immersion program in the Caesar Rodney School District is now serving kindergarten through second grade. At Downes Elementary in Newark, part of the Christina School District, the program is now in its second year. Next fall, the Colonial School District will launch a Chinese immersion program for kindergarten students at New Castle Elementary School.
Students have two teachers – a native Chinese speaker for a half day and an English speaker for a half day. Instruction in Chinese includes math, science and Chinese language and culture, and sometimes social studies. The English-speaking teacher gives lessons in English, language arts and “specials,” like art, health and music, as well as providing some “bridge lessons” to ensure that students are grasping some of the concepts taught in Chinese, according to Gregory Fulkerson, education associate for world languages at the state Department of Education.
Caesar Rodney starts about 100 students a year in the immersion program in kindergarten at McIlvane Early Childhood Center and then splits them into groups of 50 at W. B. Simpson and Allen Frear elementary schools for first through fifth grade, according to Christine Alois, the district’s supervisor of instruction.
Downes has 44 kindergarten students and 40 first graders in its immersion program, and Colonial hopes to have 50 kindergarten students taking Chinese next year
As the immersion programs develop, they will be a learning experience for both students and staff. The goal for students, Fulkerson says, is to take the Advanced Placement exam in Chinese at the end of ninth grade. While the instructional model they’re following now – a half day in Chinese and a half day in English – will likely continue through fifth grade, the arrangement will have to change to fit the more complex schedules at larger middle schools.
Several formats are being considered for middle school, Alois says. The one that seems most likely now would be to have immersion students take a Chinese language course and one of their other core subjects in Chinese and the rest of their instruction in English, she says.
Planning and organizing pieces of the curriculum requires great collaboration, says Patricia Prettyman, the principal at Downes. English-speaking and Chinese-speaking teachers who share a class of students must communicate with each other to make sure they are covering all the topics the curriculum requires. And, for science classes, Chinese-speaking teachers across the state are dividing up the units in their lesson kits, translating them into Chinese and sharing with each other, Prettyman says.
Since the immersion programs are in their early stages, there are no measurements that clearly indicate how the students are faring. That won’t come until students are in third grade and participate in the state’s new Smarter Balanced assessment program.
“It will be interesting to see how they are,” Prettyman says.
Nationally, Fulkerson says, students in immersion programs tend to test as well as or better than students in English-only classrooms. Informal assessments in Caesar Rodney and Christiana suggest that students here are following that trend, Alois and Prettyman say.
Prettyman is pleased with the progress she has seen at Downes.
When parents and others visit the immersion classrooms, “you see a lot of jaws drop,” she says. “They’re shocked at what the children are able to do at such a young age.”
