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Menlo Park On Track For Adopting FLES
Original post made
by Simon Firth, College Terrace,
on Nov 23, 2007
Supporters of FLES in Palo Alto might be interested to know that, after a Nov. 20th school board vote, the Menlo Park school district is on track to adopt an elementary foreign language (or FLES) program. The plan they are considering would slightly extend the school day, rationalize the way core and enrichment classes are scheduled and add several Spanish specialists.
For more info see:
Would this work for Palo Alto?
Posted by OhlonePar
a resident of Duveneck/St. Francis
on Nov 28, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Get it Right,
Do you have any external sources to support your assertion?
From what I read, Standard Mandarin is akin to, but not the basic dialect spoken around Beijing. And, according to the same Web site, it's not taught as immersion, but as a second language at many schools.
At the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, there was no single, national language in China nor an education system that could teach the proper sounds of any of the languages. There were archaic dictionaries and a literary Chinese over a thousand years old that little resembled the spoken vernacular. The new government decided a national language (Guoyu) must be established and so it was decided by a group of scholars in 1913 that Mandarin be made the standard. A set of phonetic symbols were created (zhuyin fuhao) and a dictionary created called Guoyin zidian (Dictionary of National Phonics). However, this dictionary did not resemble Mandarin as it was spoken because it retained pronunciations of the Ru-sheng characters, so it was a mix of northern pronunciation with the rhymes of the southern languages. Not a single person could speak the language set down in this dictionary except Yuen Ren Chao (Zhao Yuanren), a native Wu speaker but skilled linguist and phonetician who is famous for developing the tone contour system used by linguists and doing much of the early dialect fieldwork. He is the one who made a set of recordings of this dictionary for use in schools. Nobody really could learn from this dictionary, and it wasn't until 1932 that a dictionary based on the pronunciation and speech of Beijing came about.
In many schools, classes are given in the local language and Mandarin is studied as the universal language (much like a foreign language class) to use for speaking with any non-locals.
Meanwhile, from the comprehensive Wikipedia article, we get this nugget:
In December 2004, the first survey of language use in the People's Republic of China revealed that only 53% of its population, about 700 million people, could communicate in Standard Mandarin. (China Daily) A survey by South China Morning Post released in September 2006 gave the same result. This 53% is defined as a passing grade above 3-B (ie. error rate lower than 40%) of Evaluation Exam. Another survey in 2003 by the China National Language And Character Working Committee (国家语言文字工作委员会) shows, if mastery of Standard Mandarin is defined as Grade 1-A (ie. error rate lower than 3%), the percentages as follows are: Beijing 90%, Shanghai 3%, Tianjin 25%, Guangzhou 0.5%, Dalian 10%, Xi'an 12%, Chengdu 1%, Nanjing 2%. Consequently, foreign learners of Mandarin usually opt to learn at Beijing, although grammar and character learning is not confined to that area.
So, what of the above is erroneous? And how do you know it's erroneous?
I have to say that when I read this it explained a lot--such as why only slightly more than half of China can communicate in Standard Mandarin. I have to say I was surprised at what constitutes a "passing grade"--40 percent error rate? That's the kind of rate that would make me trilingual--and, believe me, I'm not.
Looking at this, I actually think there's less point, by the way, in teaching Standard Mandarin to our kids--it's not going to become an international language. Why? Because it's too hard for adults to learn and a bunch of the country doesn't speak it. I mean 3 percent in Shanghai are truly fluent?
It's interesting, "Indonesian" is also a contrived language--a sort of formalized version of a Malay dialect. Unlike Standard Mandarin, most Indonesians learned and can speak in Indonesian.
But then, it's also an easy language to learn.
Now we have 300 million Chinese learning English. English, too, is relatively easy to learn.
So is China really finally going to all be speaking Standard Mandarin--or are they going to end up going the route of India, where English is everyone's second language?
English is already widely spoken in Hong Kong. It is the language of international trade and you can learn it as an adult.
A very small percentage of Palo Alto speaks Chinese--don't actually know if it's standard Mandarin. The speakers I know speak the Hong Kong dialect.
In the county, the region, the state and the country, Spanish speakers far outstrip speakers of any of the Asian languages.
Like I say, the whole flat-earth argument becomes kind of amusing in a dark way when you start reading up on this.