A summer camp in Westside Elementary Schools aims to teach young students the Chinese culture as well as the Chinese language.

Children who have just finished kindergarten are still learning all there is to know with the English language and some of them are learning Chinese as well. 250 students will be joining the Excelling in Chinese Language Learning summer camp, which conducts a four-day activity aimed at expanding on what the students may already know about the Chinese culture.

Diane Jackson, the camp instructor, has said that they have made the program very basic for the young children since some of them have had no Chinese experience at all. Whether the camp teaches basic or non-basic material, it is trying to teach students as young as six years old a second language before they have mastered their first. According to those who are involved in the summer camp, even the youngest students seem to have few problems in learning Chinese.

Doris Grotheer, one of the instructors, said that the children do much better than even some adults do. Diane Jackson also said that the young students actually benefit from being at such a young age when they learn a new language. They are surprised at how quickly the children catch on and that the younger they are, the easier it is for them to learn a new language. By the end of the week, the instructors expect that everything the children have been taught they have pretty much taken in their system.

The Mandarin Chinese program has been funded by the Foreign Language Assistance Grant for the past two years. FLAP funded a rotation of two years through the district’s schools. The grant funded teaching positions which the district will not fund after the current fiscal year due to budget restraints. Yuan Yu, one of the teachers funded by the FLAP grant and an instructor in the summer camp, has said that she has enjoyed working with young students and said that learning about the Chinese culture will benefit them in the future.

The United States and China need to learn more about each other and language is the medium that helps people learn more about each other’s culture. The teachers who are working as instructors in the summer camp went through an intense training session in advance of the camp.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 9:38 am and is filed under Learning Abroad, Learning in holidays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.