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(Welcome back to school)
To judge the early success of Hilton Head Island Elementary School’s Chinese Immersion program, you could talk to the school district’s program evaluator, ask parents of students in the class or review scores that show how the young participants fared on tests in both English and Mandarin Chinese.
Or you could simply ask 7-year-old Aven Cassidy what she chose as a theme for her birthday party this summer.
“We tried to pick something she really, really loves,” says Lori Cassidy, Aven’s mom. “So the birthday theme was ‘Chinese.’ ”
Aven’s panda bear invitations and paper lantern decorations are proof that the IB school’s groundbreaking five-year language immersion program is already paying off. With one year now in the books and about $290,000 of the $1.4 million federal grant spent, mostly on training and educational materials, school district employee Kate Olin is busy assessing the program’s success and promoting it to other schools that want to try something similar.
“We’re receiving calls from all over the country asking how did we do this, and can we help other schools do it too,” says Olin, who is overseeing the grant’s distribution and evaluation.
They did it with a lot of planning, teacher teamwork and parental support, says Hilton Head Elementary Principal Jill McAden.
“Parent involvement has been tremendous. They’re very supportive of the program,” McAden says. Because the class was structured to teach 80 percent of the usual first-grade educational material in Chinese, McAden and her staff set a pretty cushiony safety net for students who might have felt lost or confused early on.
“Our plan was if we saw anybody sitting in this class that was not meeting success in the very first month — socially, emotionally or academically — we would conference with the parent,” McAden says.
But, McAden says, the children were enthusiastic little sponges from Day 1.
“It was a bit surprising,” she says. “I literally have chill bumps when I go in there and hear them talking because, I don’t know what they’re saying, and they’re engaged. They really want to learn, and their brains are able to soak this up.”
Of the 26 students who initially signed up for the class, 25 finished and will move on to the second grade in the same program. (One student’s family moved.)
About 80 percent of the classroom day in second grade also will be taught in Mandarin, though unlike the first grade class, which was taught by one Chinese-speaking teacher and one English-speaking teacher, the second grade class will have just one bilingual teacher at the helm.
Cassidy says she was among those who initially wondered why Chinese was chosen over Spanish. But she appreciates the global perspective her daughter is being immersed in at such a young age. A recent family trip to Vancouver’s Chinatown delighted Aven and everyone she interacted with, her mother says.
“It was the most hysterical thing to see this little white girl spitting out Chinese words,” Cassidy says. “She would sing some of the songs, say things like ‘Hi, how are you,’ and ‘I’m 6 years old.’ They got such a huge kick out of it.”
In some regards, the second language being taught is perhaps less important than the mere training of the young mind to know, recognize and flip back and forth between two distinct languages, McAden says. The students are recognizing that language is divided into four components — speaking, listening, reading and writing — and they’re honing the ability to focus in on one or more of those components at a time.
“These children have enhanced their English too, because when they pick up a book to read they know they are practicing that one component of language,” McAden says. “I can honestly tell you there’s not another first-grader that gets that outside of this program.”
Indeed, recent research on bilingual children suggests that bilingual speakers who rapidly switch between languages are better mental multitaskers than their monolingual counterparts. That seems to be backed up by this year’s Measures of Academic Progress test scores, in which the Chinese Immersion students scored higher in both reading and math than their peers in regular English-only classrooms.
While it surely came as a relief for participating parents to know their children’s English skills aren’t lagging, the district also wanted to know how the youngsters were faring in the second language they’re studying. To find out, they took the Young learners Chinese Test (YCT), which is scored in China.
“It was a little nerve-wracking to send that test off, we really didn’t know what to expect,” McAden says. “It’s a very difficult test, it’s the same test used in China for their first-graders who obviously are native speakers. And over 50 percent of our kids passed that test.”
Bolstered by such good news, the principal and her staff are busy fine-tuning the program for the next crop of first-graders, says Colleen Winn, the program’s English-speaking first-grade teacher.
They are technology-rich classrooms, where every child has access to an iPod Touch loaded with Mandarin Chinese educational activities. They’ve added special backpacks filled with activities in Chinese for the immersion students to check out of the library. And parents have access to a virtual Chinese learning program they can help their child with at home.
“The first- and second-grade classes will get together to practice conversational Chinese in a more realistic setting,” she says. “That will help all of them.” And of course there will be more activities based around Chinese culture, which the students particularly love, Winn says.
Cassidy echoes that sentiment, as she and Aven already are daydreaming about taking a trip to China in a few years.
“I didn’t know what to expect of this program. I was just glad she was learning a second language,” Cassidy says. “But she loves it, so I’m thrilled with it. She floors me with how much she already knows.”
