Story by Mary Beth Faller

The Arizona Republic

July 20, 2010

CAVE CREEK - Two elementary schools in the Cave Creek Unified School District will offer Mandarin Chinese instruction this year, joining a nationwide trend in teaching the language spoken by a large portion of the world.

All kindergarteners through sixth-graders at Horseshoe Trails and Lone Mountain will learn Mandarin, with a focus on speaking and culture, said Janiene Marlow, principal at Horseshoe Trails.

Two young teachers from Sias University, a Chinese-American college in central China, will come to the district and stay with families while they teach, along with a teacher already in the district who is fluent in Mandarin.

Horseshoe Trails' PTO paid for Marlow to travel to China last spring to get the program going. The district is waiting to hear if it received a five-year, $1.5 million federal Foreign Language Assistance Program grant. This year, Mandarin lessons will be funded through tax-credit money, the PTO and donations, including $4,000 recently received from Wells Fargo.

Eventually, Mandarin will be taught at Sonoran Trails Middle School and Cactus Shadows High School, she said.

Horseshoe Trails is applying to join the International Baccalaureate Early Years Program and must teach an international language to qualify, she said.

"We started looking at the languages that are best for our kids, and one out of every four people on this planet speaks Mandarin. It's the fastest-growing language in the world," Marlow said.

In 2006, President George Bush began the National Language Security Initiative to fund the startup of programs, from kindergarten to college, for languages considered critical to national security. FLAP offers grants only to schools that teach Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and languages in the Indic, Turkic and Iranian families.

The Mesa Unified School District has been teaching Mandarin for a few years. Deer Valley Unified School District added it at some schools last school year, and Scottsdale Unified School District's high schools will have access to Mandarin instruction this year via distance learning.

The U.S. Foreign Service and Defense Language institutes rank languages in four categories based on the hours English speakers must spend becoming fluent. Spanish and French and other Romance languages are considered related to English and are Category I, requiring up to 24 weeks or 600 hours of study. Chinese is Category IV, requiring 44 weeks or 1,100 class hours to learn.

Chinese is challenging in part because it has tones that affect the meaning of words. Plus, it has thousands of characters for writing. The Cave Creek students won't tackle writing for a while.

The district is partnering with Arizona State University's Confucius Institute, which promotes the understanding of Chinese language and culture.

The two Chinese teachers haven't arrived yet, as the district deals with passport and visa red tape. When they get here, they'll get a full Arizona experience, with a trip to the Grand Canyon, Marlow said..

Marlow is enthusiastic about the program because she grew up in an Air Force family and learned Chinese while living in Taiwan in first and second grade.

"It kind of goes full circle. You have those 'aha' moments in your life, and that was one for me."

Arizona Republic reporter Emily Gersema contributed to this story.

Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/community/scottsdale/articles/2010/07/20/20100720cave-creek-mandarin.html#ixzz0urcGO3mb