Palo Alto teens learn Mandarin Chinese in pilot national summer program
July 11, 2007
CONTACT:
Duarte Silva, Executive Director of the California Foreign Language Project, (650) 736-9042, duarte.silva@stanford.edu
Norman Masuda, STARTALK Lead Instructor, Palo Alto Unified School District, (650) 329-3850, nmasuda@pausd.org
RELEVANT URLS: http://startalk.umd.edu http://www.stanford.edu/group/CFLP/
This summer, twenty high school students in Palo Alto, CA are participating in an accelerated learning program in Mandarin Chinese language and culture as part of STARTALK, an intensive four-week pilot program being offered through the federally-funded National Security Language Initiative. Stanford University School of Education's California Foreign Language Project and the Palo Alto Unified School District, who are running the Palo Alto program, are the only Northern California recipients who were awarded a grant by STARTALK. Only 34 institutions received funding from the new federal program, which is aimed at increasing the number of Americans learning critical need languages such as Mandarin and Arabic. "As a world language, Mandarin Chinese has grown in importance in elementary and secondary education in recent years," said Stanford School of Education Professor Amado Padilla, who is documenting and evaluating the program’s activities with the assistance of doctoral students Xiaoqiu Xu and Graciela Borsato. "Students in the Palo Alto Unified School District have a unique opportunity to participate in a closely watched program aimed at advancing their learning of Mandarin in just a few short weeks. Our ultimate goal is to design teaching strategies to better enable high school students to learn Mandarin, given the difficulty of the language and the limitations of a high school calendar." Since the launch of the Palo Alto program on June 25, high school students who have completed Level 1 Mandarin Chinese have been immersed for five hours a day in language and cultural activities, including online activities in the World Languages Computer Lab at Palo Alto High School and listening to Mandarin language excerpts on iPods provided by the program to practice their speaking and listening skills. Students will also have the opportunity to further their language and cultural exposure with field trips to Chinese businesses at the Milpitas Square shopping mall, and viewings of the Asian art collections at the Stanford Cantor Museum and San Francisco's Chinese Cultural Center. In addition, parents of participating students are attending an evening program to help them understand and learn Mandarin alongside their children. Twenty Mandarin language teachers from the Bay Area, Southern California, and North Carolina are also participating in a one-week professional development workshop that is running concurrently with the student program. The teachers are receiving training in curriculum design and classroom practice by Palo Alto Unified School District’s Mandarin teachers Yanan Vrduny and Norman Masuda. For more information about STARTALK's Palo Alto program, contact Duarte Silva, Executive Director of the California Foreign Language Project, at (650) 736-9042 or duarte.silva@stanford.edu, or STARTALK Lead Instructor Norman Masuda at (650) 329-3850 or nmasuda@pausd.org.