THIS autumn, several hundred thousand youngsters across the United States are headed to taxpayer-funded classes taught in Chinese, Spanish, Korean, and other languages, the Associated Press has reported.
It is estimated that about 1 billion people in today’s world speak Chinese, and almost 400 million, Spanish, so the two languages are at the top of the list of foreign language classes at more than 300 public schools in the US.
The education representative at the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. was quoted as saying that, if Americans want to compete globally, they won’t be first any more if language skills are not good.
The new programs are part of a growing national trend to teach American children subjects like math, social studies and science in a foreign language. Four new dual-language programs are starting in New York this autumn for the first time: three in French, for the first time, including one at a school in Manhattan’s Harlem area, and one in Chinese.
More than 10,000 other New York City children have voluntarily signed up for the city education department’s 67 dual-language programs. On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, children at the public Shuang Wen Academy spend much of their school day in classes taught in Mandarin Chinese. The school is so popular among parents of non-ethnic Chinese children eager to prepare their offspring for a changing world that there’s a waiting list for admission.
In each class, about half the students are fluent in Chinese, the other half in English. Some are immigrants, others American-born. Each child also starts with separate lessons in the foreign language. The students end up helping each other with the second language while learning a subject together.
Not to be confused with controversial bilingual education designed for non-English speaking children, subjects taught in a foreign language are designed to make a child fluent in speaking and writing two languages. Most of the children start such classes as early as elementary school, or even in kindergarten.
Compared to a decade ago, there are more than twice as many American public school students getting a multilingual education, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C., a private nonprofit organization that researches issues related to language in a society.
