Learning from the Professionals - 3 Conferences to follow

Learning Mandarin is such a trend that there are a lot of hacks out there trying to tell people the best ways to do things.

In addition to the service and product providers I've put in the side bar, like book dealers and such, here are the 3 conferences that bring professional teachers together that are worth following by the rest of us:

Asia Society's Annual National Chinese Language Conference, co-organized by the College Board. Here's the link to the 2014 conference:
http://sites.asiasociety.org/nclc2014/

They'll post the schedule of presentations and sometimes both slides and video. You can see who is teaching where and what the concerns are for students studying Mandarin Chinese at different levels.

Chinese Language Educators Forum (CLEF) sponsored by NanHai:
http://nanhai.com/

Annual gathering, mostly of educators from California, but often including international guests. Teachers share perspectives and resources, new approaches. They usually post material on the website that is open to the general public.

The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, University of Minnesota:
http://www.carla.umn.edu/

Lots of research-based resources. Many papers open to the public for downloading. Perspective on language immersion for different languages. Current tracking of ongoing research projects.

When my child began formal Mandarin Immersion in 2010, I was surprised to learn how few people at our school, both professionals and parents, were being supported to connect with these resources. So many people simply did not know about them, despite these conferences having established quite an active record.

Parents, especially, should track these 3 sites. Your children's instructors should be connecting to other professionals at these regular gatherings. Your parent community needs to learn from the resources these groups make available, to prepare both you and your children for the challenging road of Dual Language Immersion with Mandarin and English, or becoming Bilingual, and/or learning Mandarin as a second/foreign language.

Anything else is secondary to following these 3 circles of thought-leaders.