Chinese Language Classes
Mandarin Chinese in North American Classrooms
Mandarin Chinese is becoming one of the hottest foreign languages on the planet thanks to both the Chinese Initiative and the world's need for imported goods.
At first blush, I was under the impression that North America, in all of it’s collective wisdom, had finally noticed worldwide trends and had adjusted educational goals accordingly. While researching the topic of Mandarin now being taught in elementary schools, I found the flip side of this educational vision and understood there is far more to the story.
San Francisco now boasts a school with two Mandarin immersion kindergarten classes. In little more then 3-months time, the program’s 5-year-olds can hold their own end of a basic conversation with teacher Angelica Lang.
Other school districts around the U.S and in Canada are following suit. Chinese language programs run the gamut from immersion programs at a very young age, to regularly scheduled language classes and after-school programs, but the goal is clear: to familiarize young students with Mandarin, thereby increasing their chances of economic prosperity in the world of tomorrow.
Why the growing interest?
- Trade missions (meant to increase not only our exports, but to find quality goods at a lower cost to import), originating from virtually every state and province in North America
- The 2008 Summer Olympics, to be hosted by Beijing
- President Bushes proposed $57 million in federal spending to encourage Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean
- Two-hundred million Chinese children studying English
- A Joint push by North American governments to understand an emerging global partner
On the other side of the ocean, Beijing has launched it’s own global campaign to make Chinese the number one language in the world. Robert Davis, the director of Chicago’s comprehensive Chinese language program states, “The days of everybody trying to be American are over.”
Like Davis, Ma Jianfei, the deputy director general of the National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language takes his duty of transporting Mandarin around the world very seriously. By start of the 2007 school year, all elementary and middle schools in Thailand and South Korea will offer Chinese. Europe, France and Germany are also supporting the import of the Mandarin language. North America is literally the next stop on Jianfei’s plan to spread the (Mandarin) word.
Mandarin Chinese is the most popular first language on the planet, boasting 500-million more speakers than English! It is also the second most common language on the Internet. Currently, figures suggest that 30 million people around the world are learning Chinese as a second language, but Jianfei would like to increase that number to over 100 million in the next four years. The Chinese government is behind this push, both philosophically and financially to the tune of nearly 25 million dollars per year.
