Mandarin immersion program in Minneapolis

[question everything]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=219x15912

From TIME, profiling Yinghua Academy, a charter public school where elementary students of every ethnicity study subjects ranging from math to American history in Mandarin.

I wonder where it is located. It is described as "arty neighborhood of Minneapolis."

[dflprincess]

1. According to Google, Yinghua Academy is located at

1616 Buchanan St NE.

[dpbrown]

2. St Paul Public School in Highland Park has a K-14 Chinese program

It's not immersion, but it's public.

[question everything]

3. That's good.

As the article states - learning a second language improves all skills.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. It looks as if they're using native speaker teachers

That's good. It's even better if there are some students who speak Chinese at home.

If you don't have native speaker teachers and at least some native speaker students, you run the risk of the students developing a "classroom dialect," since they will reinforce one another's mistakes.

That is what I observed in Portland's Japanese immersion classes. The results were poor, even after the students had been in the program for 10 years, but few of the parents could tell. Their pronunciation and comprehension were good, but their speaking was no better than that of an average second-year college student.

The Spanish immersion classes, which included native speaker teachers and a lot of students who came from Spanish-speaking homes, were a lot more successful, it seemed.