Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/mandarin-spoken-here/5022130/
Imagining children chattering to each other in a Portland, Oregon, classroom in a language other than English is not particularly surprising, but the Albina Head Start and Early Head Start program really might surprise you. If you wander into their bilingual classrooms, you’ll find toddlers and preschool children, largely native-English speakers, learning their first few words of Mandarin.The research consensus is that there are distinct benefits to children being bilingual, and there’s a long-term economic case in a diverse country and globalized world for speaking multiple languages. Perhaps most importantly, an environment rich in language and cultures is the best starting point for children to understand their world.
The Albina program is beginning its third year, firmly established after several years of work to grow the effort. In 2011, director Ron Herndon heard about the Confucius Institute at Portland State University placing native-speaking Mandarin teachers in K-12 schools and his team got to work finding out how Head Start could have a Mandarin teacher of their own. Parents were educated about the importance of their children learning a second language, the opportunities their children would gain if they studied it through high school, and the long-term advantages of bilingualism for brain ...