I understand that most of what I've written on this blog is not very concrete, but more focused on describing attitudes and points of view. It is hard to "see" why someone like me would have so many objections to all the things going wrong in MI programs without seeing anything concrete.
I came across old summer homework that was post-1st grade for us. It is hard to look forward in these programs because parents like me, we never had MI as an opportunity or resource. With so many parents like me saying that Saturday Chinese School was terrible and thinking that full-time MI must be better, then it is hard to break down all the mythologies that seem to have been built up around Mandarin Immersion programs.
But I will assert something that one ABC mom had said to me awhile ago - "I expect my daughter to do at least as much as I did, and hope that she will be able to do more."
Example of why it was NOT as much as we did as kids in Saturday School:
Vocabulary box at the top has these characters/vocabularies listed inside:
回家， 多少，走路，都是， 再见， 笑话，每天，兔子，洗手，果汁，休息，汽车，飞机
Below are fill-in-the-blank exercises wherein one of the characters is missing and the child is supposed to write in the one that matches:
回——， 多——， ——路，——是，——见，——话，——天，——子，——手，果——，——息，——车，飞——
My child was assigned not one but several of these worksheets as summer review. For the finish of First Grade, going into Second Grade. Drawing lines to match 2 characters or circling them in a Word Search type format were also included.
Suffice to say, thankfully I have skills enough to have already pushed my child to do far more than this in the prior year. We were already doing this much and more from our K year and beyond, thanks to a teacher with higher expectations and the Jinshan University textbooks. (And to be completely fair to the teachers of that year, they were brand new to the school. This material was inherited from the prior teacher who had been a wonderful instructor in the way she held herself, but clearly had very low literacy expectations for these kids. I don't doubt it was derived from the student demographics and not from this teacher's own abilities, were she to be teaching in a heritage school.)
But how were the English-only (or non-Chinese-language-proficient) parents supposed to judge this material?
Any native speaker of Chinese should be looking at this in horror. Given the number of hours that your child is supposedly working hard during the school year, 9 months out of the year, 5 days per week, and a majority percentage of a 6 to 7-hour day... I expected my child to have accomplished far more than this level of mastery. Sure, there were more characters/vocabularies than what I've written above. But not by much. Even if you double or triple the numbers, here, you are not looking at a very high level of cognitive mastery to reflect the age of 6 years old. You aren't even reflecting the finish of Kindergarten for kids who are living in China or Taiwan or who are going to a well-functioning Chinese School on the weekends.
For the English-only crowd: all I can say is, without fully translating every word or what it represents in the entire canon of what you are presented with in these packets, it all sums up as "See Spot Run" vocabulary and expression. Moreover, without the requirement that you at least listen to CDs and/or DVDs or watch YouTube videos to get your child to sing songs in Chinese, then where is the whole language experience for your kid? And while teachers might say, this is only a bare minimum of writing and reading review, the total message becomes, "This is the total sum of what your child is expected to have mastered at this age."
I understand that both parents and teachers have witnessed some English-only kids (or those coming from a language that is not Chinese) who seem to be "doing better" and seem to be able to speak more. These kids are likely engaged with a tutor during the out-of-school times. But that engagement that is so focused on speaking/listening will not carry these kids into middle and high school, or even beyond with functional proficiency. Why? How do I know this? It all comes from the high rates of bilinguals in this country who did not get academic training in their parents' native language. Low levels of heritage language training can be found in lots of ethnic communities. Plenty of Chinese kids grew up with this level of language and even more so in the home, but cannot speak like an adult or necessarily read even to that low elementary level.
Without the literacy to match all that burgeoning skill in speaking and listening, then very little of it will stick. Moreover, without engaging in literature that keeps pace with the grade level academics, then your kid will only master language that is about classroom management ("sit up" "stand over there" "line up," "raise your hand") and whatever activities your tutor reinforces. If you are not making sure that your child gets consistent, systematic training that continuously goes forward, while simultaneously circling back to review and reinforce, then there is no way your poor child can hang on to so many words and ideas coming at him and constructed in a syntax that is so completely different from the language he knows. Without the experience of "whole language" through good literature, then unless you can afford paying a bunch of highly eloquent educated Mandarin speaking adults to be around your kid much of the time, then you are seriously out of luck with this weak listening/speaking osmosis approach.
Going back to this homework - many of us parents then asked, if this is where things are for First Grade, do things get exponentially harder during 2nd grade so that the kids can end up somewhere reasonable for the amount of time that is being invested? As it turned out, the answer was "No." Then, looking at 3rd grade homework, truly, not much more was being accomplished. The rate of both volume increase and difficulty was not even at a high linear slope. Very gentle, barely sloping increase. (For the character counters out there, this wasn't just about the number of characters, but also the quality of the vocabularies and expressions.)
Part of sticking around is about making the calculation of just how bad will it be. Can I supplement at home? Is it still worth it to have Chinese every day? Is it still better than Saturday Chinese School? Can I tough it out at home and teach Chinese myself? Do I have the resources to go elsewhere? There are no easy answers to these questions for both the native speaking Chinese and the higher-performing bilinguals.
As I pressed some of the teachers to provide answers to those of us who knew that this was bad, we got a variety of answers. The teachers who were from ABC backgrounds and had achieved their high levels of Chinese through studies in America (Chinese heritage schools and college, graduate school), they also knew that this was less than what we had gotten at Chinese school as kids. But they were convinced by their training that this was all that a majority English-only group of kids could do, especially with the paucity of resources they were given. I could not argue with that perspective.
Then there were the native speaker Chinese teachers. Here is where a combination of life experience and professional teaching experience may fail everyone. Teachers who have little background in understanding what ABC's have been able to do in America, then they might couple their lack of understanding with what they witness as the high rates of ABC's with very poor Chinese language skills, that they are convinced all of it is a struggle, anyway. So I can see how difficult it would be to convince them of "more" being better. Moreover, none of these teachers want to be pegged as the main culprits for failure.
I don't blame them. They are stuck in a complicated situation. There has been far too much blame assigned to teachers and teachers alone (not ever administrators or policy makers who are, in all cases, making 2 and 3 times the money that classroom teachers are making) for student failure. Keep the standards low, then it will be easier to get more kids over this bar. Raise the standards higher... well, that is, in fact, a crazy proposition when faced with so many kids who simply don't know Mandarin Chinese at all.
All of these teachers, however, are vulnerable to caving to parent pressure. Whether ethnically Chinese or non-Chinese American, I hear from Mandarin teachers everywhere that many parents simply complain that learning Chinese is too much work. They don't like the homework; it's too hard to get their kids to sit through it; they have their own ideas about how their genius kids will get to high levels of mastery (which seem not to include homework or any sort of focus or dedication). Parent complaints, then, end up being the single largest reason that decent and even good Chinese language teachers become ineffective teachers in the eyes of native Chinese parents and the higher-performing Chinese-American parents.
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