Comments about ‘Bridge to China: Benefits of controversial program outweigh costs, proponents say’

So where is the controversy?

Even the most "conservative" of people could see that this is a great move by our educators. Knowing Chinese is going to prove an invaluable resource. The more ties we make now, the more jobs we have in the future.

Great job once again by our local educators.

Business and the system is short changing our children of their education again. Once and for all, the education system must be segregated from any business influence. It is not meant as a job training program for business.

First and foremost, education must not be used to indoctrinate or segregate children by class or future job applicants. Children of Utah deserve and education first, stop this insanity in eduction. Our children need an education and this is not eduction, it is indoctrination.

It's no wonder that children leaving high school have no eduction, they are ordained job prospects.

Why does the Utah eduction system continue to deny our children of an eduction and why do they continue to disobey the responsibility of educators? These children deserve a chance for themselves to decided what they want in life, this preordained mind control classes are not what they should be subjected to. They are being indoctrinated and denied their rights of free will.

Parents should pull their children from these classes at once if they wish to have any say about their education. Using the education system to raise slaves is a terrible system.

Given the current state of government affairs, one day we will all be speaking Chinese.

Is this program something we should be spending our tax dollars on, when so many people can't even pay their mortgages?
Our 'leaders' are out of touch with reality.

Preparing for a career in the high-tech industry, it makes far more sense for a child to learn Chinese than Spanish. Electronics manufacturing will likely never return to the USA, and though the companies may be headquartered in the USA, they will need people versed in the Chinese language.

I remember the Japanese immersion in the 1980's.

Can someone explain to me how teaching children in UT CHINESE is going to be useful to them in the future? I took French in high school, but I can't count the times I wish I had taken Spanish instead.

I think the statistic is by 2020, 1 in every 10 people in the USA will be a Spanish speaker. HOW is CHINESE going to help????

Utah has hundreds of returned missionaries who spent two years in Taiwan and speak wonderful Chinese. How many speak Chinese in their occupations? The chances that these students will need Chinese for the jobs is very slim. Also, how many of the instructors are returned missionaries or native Chinese. Do they need to go to China to teach? It sounds like a wonderful vacation for these teachers but it's not educationally vital.

Learning to speak a foreign language actually enhances student's education. Research has repeatedly shown that students who learn a foreign language outperform their monolingual counterparts in their native language. In other words, if you want to increase student's scores on standardized English tests statewide, enroll them in a second language program.

Also, these programs are open enrollment, which means that parents are choosing to enroll their children in them. It's all about choice. Nobody's being forced and there are actually long waiting lists.

Finally, it's incredibly naïve to think that our education system is not meant to prepare the future workforce. The problem is when we separate education from the real world. If not to prepare them for the future workforce, then what are we preparing students for?

Excellent coverage. This is win win at minimal expense. Unless Utah is foolish enough to invalidate language credits earned in this manner every state in the nation should follow suit. For pinheads that see this as mission prep I would suggest, then, that no foreign language be taught in American schools. Uh huh, regression at its worst.

Learning to speak a second language is a wonderful idea. However, I do not think that immersion programs throughout elementary school are the proper forum to teach a new language. Our children already struggle to keep up with curriculum taught when I was in grade school 20 years ago. Further, the curriculum has changed to spend less time on our own history and language arts and more on comparatively frivolous topics.

For example, I asked a group of 4th graders why we celebrated the 4th of July. None of them could answer.

I asked a group of 7th graders to identify an adjective in the following sentence: "The red car drove quickly down the street." None of them could do it.

Spelling and simple English language arts skills are suffering while we use tax dollars to teach Chinese. Many children in our neighborhood who are in the Chinese immersion program have come home in tears because they cannot understand anything being taught.

I support learning a second language. I do not think this immersion program is the way to do achieve this goal because our students are struggling to learn their native language.

Just a comment to the above naysayers.

It should be noted that more children in China are now learning to speak and write English fluently than the total population of the United States. The effort at this school is not a waste of time and enrollment IS VOLUNTARY for the parents.

Sounds like a great program. Money well spent.

Seems too much emphasis on fluency in English while other skills fall by the wayside. Programs need to be well rounded. Seems simple things like History have been sacrificed on the altar of AYP. Thanks Bush.

VST, English may be MORE useful in China.

The job market in UT especially, will take you in heartbeat if you can speak Spanish. Many job ads specify that Spanish speaking is preferred/mandatory, as sickening as that is.

I'm not saying don't teach the students Chinese if they want to learn it, but it seems to me that the focus needs to be on the practical applications of something before using tax payer dollars to fund it.

It's like an old Little House episode where they wanted to revamp the cirriculum to get state dollars. And the guy at the end of the episode agrees with Laura, that while French and Art History Mrs. Olsen was teaching were great, they'd do a lot better learning about agriculture since the reality for most was they'd grow up to be farmers.

If we want to make language learning a priority, we need to start in elementary school. To master another language requires hours of exposure and work, and immersion programs do an excellent job of providing that. It's much easier to start immersion in elementary school, where the foundational math, science, etc. concepts being taught go hand in hand with the students' rudamentary second language skills, than to begin later in the student's education, where there would be a more pronounced mismatch between their limited foreign language skills and the complex concepts they need to learn. Additionally, if language instruction begins in elementary school, students are much more likely to develop a native accent, because they are still within the critical period for acquisition of pronunciation.

Over the long term, an immersion curriculum will not lead to deficiencies in other subjects--quite the contrary. Besides, subjects such as grammatical analysis and American history can be learned equally well by children and adults. With languages, on the other hand, those who begin as children fare better than those who begin later; our brains are just wired that way. We ought to recognize this and adjust the curriculum accordingly.

Actually, studies have shown that children before puberty pick up on languages much more quickly than others. Also, becoming fluent in a second language makes it easier to become fluent in more languages. I don't think it matters what language it is. Chinese may or may not prove useful to these children in the future, but the act of learning to be fluent in another language definitely will.

On the other hand:

I think that your post is devoid of any evidence, but rather full of opinion. You absolutely have the right to express your opinion, but I do not think that your post has much merit. I learned a language at age 19. So did my brother. And my father. And my best friend. And my boss. The list goes on and on. The idea that children fare better learning languages is subject to debate among scientists. (For sources, please see a great article by the Center for Applied Linguistics about this "myth").

I think that teaching children proper rules of English usage and structure when they are adults is teaching too late. The same applies to teaching American history. We cannot wait until children are adults to teach them about our history or other civics lessons. Please teach children new languages; just please do not do so at the expense of teaching them fundamentals of their own language and history.

SLC gal,

My daughter was hired by her company in Southern California because she could speak Mandarin; not because she could speak Spanish. Learning Spanish is important but so is learning Mandarin.

For those who would challenge my argument, I would suggest you need to become better educated on how significantly interlinked our two economies and cultures (China & USA) have become. It will continue to become even more interlinked in the future.

I am all for voluntary foreign language programs, but that should not entail these kinds of expenses. Further, I think contact with China finally needs to be cut off until their government makes some changes. Their human rights violations are off the charts. Lets teach that to the kids.

We the People:

As an applied linguist and adult language learner, I'm familiar with this debate. Postpubescent beginners can indeed learn languages; in fact, they have significant cognitive advantages. However, those who begin language learning in childhood and follow a consistent language curriculum over the years are much more likely to achieve native-like proficiency. And although the mechanisms are not fully understood, young children indisputably acquire the phonology of new languages much more effectively, and very differently, than teens or adults.

Regarding sources, consider the following from the article you cite: "The research cited above does not suggest, however, that early exposure to an L2 is detrimental. An early start for 'foreign' language learners, for example, makes a long sequence of instruction leading to potential communicative proficiency possible...."

One more, from How Languages Are Learned, Second Edition, Lightbown and Spada, 1999, p. 164:

"The research evidence is fairly strong that only those who begin second language learning at an early age will eventually be indistinguishable from native speakers."

Finally, I agree that we should integrate foreign language instruction with instruction in English usage, history, math, and other subjects. That's what dual immersion is all about.

Almost anyone that has learned a second language recognizes the value it has in understanding one's primary language. I've spent time studying 4 different languages (some more than others), and it has helped me both in writing and speaking English.

While there may be some small debate, most researches would agree that learning a language as a child is easier than as an adult - most notably in recognizing subtle foreign accents and being able to replicate them.

The children are still learning ALL the same subjects, it just happens that some of them are taught in another language. On almost all standardized test scores, they do as well or better than their peers (when controlling for income and parents' educational background). Hydrogen and oxygen still make up the components of water, no matter what language you speak.

The state should be doing all it can to give Utah students an education filled with opportunities to think outside the box and to see the world as something more than just the Wasatch Front first-hand in their classrooms. These programs are just what can give Utah students a step up in the world.