Math lessons in Mandarin? Local schools go global
In a growing number of Seattle-area classrooms, students spend half their school day immersed in a language other than English. One example is Beacon Hill International School in Seattle, where kindergartners can study in Spanish or Mandarin Chinese.
Seattle Times education reporter
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KEN LAMBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES
Mandarin-immersion teacher Ying Ying Wu offers instruction to first-grade students Abby Zhou, left, and Cyrus Davies at Beacon Hill International School.
INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL FACTS
Number of language-immersion programs statewide:No precise count, but it's in the dozens.In the Seattle area: Examples include Woodin Elementary in the Northshore School District; Puesta del Sol in the Bellevue School District; and Beacon Hill, Concord and John Stanford elementaries and Hamilton and Denny middle schools in Seattle.
Features of Seattle's international schools: All students learn more about global issues and perspectives, and parents may enroll children in language-immersion classes, in which students spend part of the day learning in English and part learning science, math or other subjects in another language. The languages per se are not taught, but students learn through repetition and teachers' visual clues. The schools also have English-only options.
Entrance requirements for Beacon Hill immersion classes: None for kindergartners and first-graders; other students must have some understanding of the selected language.
Source: Seattle Public Schools and Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction
For nearly an hour, no one speaks a word of English in this first-grade math class.
Not the teacher, Ying Ying Wu, who talks energetically in Mandarin's songlike tones.
Not the students — 6- and 7-year-olds who seem to follow along fine, even though only one speaks Mandarin at home.
Even the math test has been translated, by Wu, into Chinese characters.
At Beacon Hill International School, many students learn a second language along with their ABCs by spending half of each school day immersed in Mandarin Chinese or Spanish.
It's an approach parents are clamoring for because they want their children to be able to communicate in our increasingly international world. The waiting list at Seattle's first international school — John Stanford, in Wallingford — has been long since its program began in 2000.
Beacon Hill, which had no waiting list to speak of before it adopted a similar program 1-½ years ago, had to turn away 75 families last fall.
Yet such programs are still rare in Seattle and throughout the country, despite all the talk about global competitiveness and the fact that anyone will tell you it's best to learn languages when you're young. The United States is perhaps the only nation where foreign-language instruction typically doesn't begin until middle or high school. Even in Africa, elementary-school students are studying Chinese.
For a non-Mandarin-speaking visitor, Wu's class is a puzzle. The only way to figure out what's going on is to observe the children. It's only when they write their names on the top of their tests or answer a math