Grand Traverse County
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Jan-Michael Stump
Preschoolers are learning Chinese
Pilot program offered at Traverse Heights
TRAVERSE CITY -- Yingnan Zhang flipped through a booklet of Chinese characters, each one representing a different student in her preschool class.
"Stop when I get to your name," Zhang instructed.
McLean Desmond closely eyed the pictures until one looked familiar.
"That one," she said, pointing.
"Are you sure?" Zhang asked, turning to the next page. "How about this one?"
"No," McLean said.
She was right. The picture she recognized was the Chinese character for her name.
McLean, 4, is among 32 students in a Chinese/English immersion pilot preschool program at Traverse Heights Elementary in Traverse City, one of five such programs in the state.
In addition to their names, McLean and her classmates know colors and basic vocabulary words, can count to 10 and understand the words to several songs -- all in Mandarin Chinese.
"They have picked this up faster than I expected," said Amy Pilarski, an assistant preschool teacher who works with the program.
That's the point.
Immersion works because students' minds are incredibly pliable at their age, making it easy for them to acquire language skills, said Cheryl Bloomquist, early childhood director for Traverse City Area Public Schools.
Young children learn languages differently than adults do, by hearing the words and making connections through their daily activities instead of memorizing vocabulary words and conjugating verbs, Bloomquist said.
For instance, Zhang, the program's lead Chinese teacher, said her students can repeat almost an entire song by the second or third time they hear it.
"The kids are very cute," she said. "They are quick learners."
Zhang is a second-year master's degree student at Beijing Normal University, studying the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language. She was recruited through Michigan State University's U.S.-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence and has been in Michigan since late August.
The center also provides training opportunities and helps districts develop a program that best fits their schools.
Last year, Lansing became the first Michigan city to start a Chinese immersion program, said Nancy Romig, the MSU center's senior project director. In addition to Traverse City, Van Buren Public Schools in Belleville and two districts in Oakland County adopted immersion programs.
But Michigan lags behind other states in getting started, Romig said, citing examples of successful immersion programs in Portland, Ore., San Francisco and New York that have operated for years.
Part of the reason, she said, is because they tend to develop in larger cities with a greater number of native speakers.
"We really like the fact that our Michigan sites are catering to a diverse population, and not just native speakers," Romig said.
In Traverse City, the program is funded through dollars earmarked for preschool education, Bloomquist said.
Students can be enrolled on a tuition basis, which is higher than traditional preschool programs because of the immersion component, she said. State funding is available for students who meet certain eligibility factors.
Class meets for a full day Monday through Thursday. Students spend half their day with Zhang studying Chinese and the other half in an English-speaking classroom next door.
During a recent lesson, students practiced color vocabulary words with the help of a puppet, and performed a series of actions, such as twirling or clapping their hands, based on Zhang's direction in Chinese.
The idea is to expose students to cultures and learning from both hemispheres, such as strong content-based education in the East and problem-solving and creativity in the West, Romig said.
It also gives students a foundation they will need to compete in a global economy as adults.
"Chinese happens to be a language that isn't widely offered, and also one that is going to be a very important language, globally speaking," Bloomquist said. "Our global community is getting much more interrelated and interconnected."
That's part of the reason Matt Desmond enrolled McLean.
Since September, McLean's grasp of the language has increased, and Desmond often catches his daughter speaking Chinese to her dolls. He listens to an instructional CD while driving so he can understand what she's learning.
"She'll walk around the house practicing the numbers," he said. "She absolutely understands that she's learning a foreign language."
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