Only Muscatine and Rivermont secondary schools offer Chinese to their students
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By Alma Gaul | Friday, January 11, 2008 |
With China growing as a global power and Mandarin being the most widely spoken first language in the world, the lack of Chinese language teaching in American public schools is a weakness, some educators say.
The problem is a lack of certified teachers.
“Just as the United States has built up a huge trade deficit with China, the teacher shortage reveals America’s language deficit,” states the Christian Science Monitor. “In China, some 200 million students are studying English through programs put in place decades ago. In the U.S., the sudden attention on Mandarin has exposed a serious lack of infrastructure.”
In the Quad-City region, Mandarin is taught at Rivermont Collegiate, a private school in Bettendorf, and at Muscatine (Iowa) High School.
None of the public high schools in Rock Island and Scott counties teach Chinese. In fact, Muscatine is one of only six public schools in the state of Iowa to offer Chinese. The others are in Des Moines, West Des Moines, Johnston, Council Bluffs and the Mid-Prairie district, according to Department of Education records for the 2006-07 school year and Rebecca Kessler of the Iowa City location of the Confucius Institute.
In Illinois, Chinese is taught in several Chicago-area districts.
The Pleasant Valley and Davenport School districts have formally discussed offering Chinese, representatives of the two systems said.
Cyndy Behrer, assistant superintendent at Pleasant Valley, said the same issues that prompted PV to offer Japanese — that country’s place as an economic power — are now true of China.
The district had hoped to offer Chinese beginning with the 2008 school year, but the pieces have not yet fallen into place, she said. If the district begins a program, it would prefer to offer it as a multi-year language option rather than just a one-year elective, she added.
The Muscatine program is taught by Carol Kula, a native of Central City, Iowa, who got interested in Chinese during her first years at the University of Iowa when she worked in food service with students from China.
“They talked to each other, and I thought it would be interesting to know what they were talking about,” she said. “For some reason, I was motivated to learn Chinese. Some people think it is really difficult when actually it is just different. And it takes time. It takes four times longer than some other languages.”
Kula moved to the Muscatine district in 1999 as an English as a Second Language teacher and began teaching Chinese at the high school in the 2006-07 school year. Fifteen students enrolled the first year with 10 continuing to level 2 this year, and 35 are taking her level 1 course this year.
China’s Ministry of Education predicts that 100 million people around the world will be taking Chinese lessons by 2010.
“Chinese isn’t the new French, it’s the new English,” Robert Davis, director of the Chinese-language program in Chicago’s public school system, told the Gannett News Service,
“That the world is speaking English is really a double-edged sword for the American people,” Shuhan Wang, head of Chinese language initiatives at the Asia Society in New York, told the Christian Science Monitor. “It makes it easier for us (Americans). … The problem is that people understand us, but we don’t comprehend them at all.”
Alma Gaul can be contacted at (563) 383-2324 or agaul@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.
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