The Science of Smart - radio/podcast by American RadioWorks

This was just broadcast in August 2014:
http://www.americanradioworks.org/documentaries/the-science-of-smart/

Two areas of key insights for Mandarin Immersion programs -

1. A study on bilingual brains
2. Utah's Mandarin Immersion programs

I have often said that the stuff being purveyed about "bilingual kids" being smarter is a bit of a fallacy. This reasoning is being used to promote enrollment into language immersion programs. But one of the really big problems is that "the studies" can only look at people who actually turn out to be bilingual, not kids who later became adults but do not have actual bilingual skills as adults.

So there is nothing out there that "proves" that your kid, with low levels of engagement and skill building while attending a language immersion program, will then turn out to be "smarter" just like those bilingual individuals that have, in fact, been studied.

As for the Utah programs, listen carefully to what they say. Utah is doing 50% of the day, not a dual immersion design. They know that they must be One-Way immersion, not Two-Way, because of their student population. But also, look into what and how they are teaching. They have a curriculum. They know what it looks like. They have native English speaking teachers teaching in English, and native Chinese speaking teachers teaching in Chinese. They do not need to force teachers to be fluent in both languages. This is not the case with the politics of every school district. Plus, the Utah programs have carefully and thoughtfully chosen content to be their guide in designing the curriculum, not the ACTFL standards. They may be mapping to ACTFL, and even to Common Core, but they are using the Common Core Content as their guides for the "what," not ACTFL.

There are more resources out there for Utah's MI programs. I will try to post here another day.