STARTALK Summer Mandarin Program in Palo Alto Palo Alto, CA. This summer high school students in Palo Alto are participating in a four-week intensive Mandarin Chinese language and culture program called STARTALK. As part of a series of awarded grants averaging $100,000 to 34 institutions in 22 states and the District of Columbia, the California Foreign Language Project based in the Stanford University School of Education and the Palo Alto Unified School District are the only recipients in Northern California. As the newest of the component programs of the National Security Language Initiative (NSLI) announced by President Bush in January 2006, the initiative seeks to expand and improve the teaching and learning of strategically important world languages not widely taught in the United States. This present initiative targeted the Arabic and Mandarin Chinese languages. Twenty students in the Palo Alto program who have completed Level 1 Mandarin Chinese are immersed for five hours a day in language and cultural activities, including daily on-line and computer-related activities in the dedicated World Languages Computer Lab at Palo Alto High School. Homework assignments include practice on podcasts of language excerpts and cultural features using iPods provided by the program. Three field trips are planned to visit the Asian collection at the Stanford Cantor Museum, Chinese businesses at the Milpitas Square shopping mall and a tour of San Francisco’s Chinatown (Chinese Culture Center). These extension activities allow students to further practice the Mandarin Chinese they are studying. Two other components of the program include a one-week teacher training institute for Chinese language teachers and a Chinese for Parents of the students evening program, which was added to help the parents understand what their students are studying and to learn Chinese together with them. Teachers of Mandarin Chinese are in high demand in Bay Area schools and throughout California as they expand their world language offerings to include Mandarin Chinese. Teachers participating in this professional development program will allow them to observe the two Palo Alto Unified School District’s Mandarin Chinese teachers, Ms. Yanan Vrduny and Mr. Norman Masuda teaching the students and be coached in lesson development parallel to those they have observed. The participating teachers will teach what they have learned at their respective schools in the fall. For further information about STARTALK, please consult the project’s national website, www.startalk.umd.edu/ and for the Palo Alto program, the director, Dr. Duarte Silva: Duarte.silva@stanford.edu, or telephone: (650) 736-9042 and Mr. Norman Masuda, the lead instructor for the program: nmasuda@pausd.org and telephone: (650) 329-3850.
California Foreign Language Project