Picture the first day of kindergarten: the anxiety of meeting classmates for the first time, of being separated from your parents for six hours, of starting a whole new, slightly scary chapter of your life.
Now add to that the prospect of learning math and science in a completely different language: Chinese.
The idea may seem daunting to Americans raised in a traditional educational system, but increasing numbers of parents, including some in the Washington area, are enrolling their children in language immersion programs, especially as more studies are released suggesting a link between foreign language immersion in youth and greater cognitive abilities.
According to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, research has revealed a host of benefits to learning a second language as early as age 3.
Linked to early language learning are higher academic achievement on standardized tests, increased linguistic awareness and greater memory skills and problem-solving abilities.
It’s also a matter of keeping up with the rest of the world, experts said. It is common for children in most other countries to start learning a foreign language in primary school, according to Alan Cheung, executive director of the Confucius Institute, which promotes education about Chinese language and culture.
Cheung said children should start learning languages at a young age.
“Many [Europeans speak] multiple languages and many Asians speak multiple dialects,” Cheung said. “There is a common joke, which is: people who speak two languages are called bilingual, people who speak three languages are called trilingual and people who speak one language are called Americans.”
In the Washington area, two Montgomery County public schools have Chinese immersion programs. Potomac Elementary School launched the nation’s first Mandarin immersion program at the elementary level in 1996, and the county started a second Chinese immersion program at College Gardens Elementary in Rockville in 2005.
The county had already pioneered immersion programs in other languages, beginning with the nation’s first French immersion program in 1974.
Judith Klimpl, supervisor for the Foreign Language Program at MCPS, said her predecessor, Myriam Mett, decided to start a Chinese immersion program because it had the strongest community support.
“[Mett] was interested in starting an immersion program in an Asian language,” Klimpl said. “It is my understanding that the interest in the community was highest for Chinese.”
Montgomery County now has seven elementary school language immersion programs: two Chinese, two French and three Spanish. Prince George’s County and Baltimore City both have similar programs.
Supporters see Chinese immersion programs as an essential response to China’s growing influence in an increasingly globalized world. A 2005 article in Newsweek headlined “The Future Doesn’t Speak French,” attributed the popularity of Chinese language programs to “China’s increasing competitiveness.”
Still, while Chinese programs are on the rise, the Newsweek article cited statistics showing that about 1 million American students learned French, a language spoken by 75 million people worldwide, while only about 24,000 studied Chinese, which is spoken by 1.3 billion people.
At College Gardens Elementary, about 99 students are enrolled in the Chinese immersion program, according to a 2009 article in The Gazette. At the university, there are a little more than 150 students taking Chinese courses, Cheung said.
Some students who had not taken Chinese courses before coming to college marveled at the immersion programs and said they would have benefited from immersion classes in elementary school.
“I wish I had done any kind of immersion… because when you’re young, you’re in that critical period for learning languages,” Lelia Glass, a sophomore linguistics and economics major at the University of Chicago, said.
Glass started taking Chinese classes as a freshman and spent last summer in Beijing improving her language and writing skills.
She added, however, that she might have found learning written Chinese daunting as an elementary schooler.
“I’m not sure how I would have dealt with the writing system…I don’t know if it would have made me hate school,” she said. “But as far as speaking and comprehension, I think I would have really benefitted [from immersion.]”
Klimpl said learning Chinese through immersion was different from learning a romance language, such as Spanish or French.
She said Chinese is a category 4 language, which means that it takes approximately four times as many classroom hours to reach the same point of mastery as students studying other languages that are closer to English.
“All of the things you learn in English or French — sounding out words, phonetics — you can’t do that in Chinese,” she said. “There are also no cognates.”
Unlike Montgomery County’s French and Spanish immersion programs, where students receive instruction in every subject other than electives in their chosen foreign language, the Chinese programs are only partial immersion.
Klimpl said this was partly because teachers lack educational resources, such as workbooks and novels, in Chinese.
There is also the difficulty of the language. “You can’t go in and just start reading and writing in Chinese,” she said.
