Setting the Context
Since the 1990s and especially during the turn of the twenty first century, the number of students learning Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language in the United States and other parts of the world has been rapidly increasing, particularly when compared to its growth in the previous decades (e.g., Zhou, 2010). 汉语热 (Hànyǔ rè 1 “Chinese language fever”), has become a term frequently used in the media to describe the rising interest in learning Chinese 2 that has coincided with, or perhaps also engendered by, China’s growth as a global economic power (e.g., Chai & Wang, 2017; Scrimgeour, 2014). Under the climate of language order and ideology change in the United States (Zhou, 2010), several macro level factors are highly critical in shaping and propelling the growth of the field of Chinese language teaching and learning in the United States, including funding provided by both the US and Chinese governments, efforts from nongovernmental organizations such as the College Board and Asia, as well as interests from the business sector (Lo Bianco, 2007; Orton, 2010; Wang, 2012).
The rapid increase in Chinese language learners has also attracted serious research attention. More than ten recent monographs or edited works dedicated to Chinese language education, second language acquisition and assessment of Chinese have been published in English-speaking countries since 2010 (e.g., Duff et al., 2013; Everson & Shen, 2010; Han, 2014, 2017; Jiang, 2014; Kecskes & Sun, 2017; Ruan, Zhang, & Leung, 2016; Tsung & Cruickshank, 2011; Wen & Jiang, 2019; Zhang & Lin, 2017), not to mention those published in Chinese-speaking regions. However, one critical issue in the body of research on Chinese second/foreign language learning (CSL/CFL 3 ) is its almost exclusive focus on college-level or adult learners, which seems to be commonly observed among studies concerning foreign language learning. In a descriptive review of the 97 articles published in the Modern Language Journal between 2001 and 2014, Collins and Muñoz (2016) has observed that only 7 of the 97 studies (7.87%) included children at the primary school level. However, in the case of CFL in the United States and other parts of the world, the majority of learners are in the kindergarten to 12th grade (henceforth, K–12) classrooms. According to one report, worldwide, learners enrolled in the K–12 sector is eight times of those in the college CFL classrooms (Chai & Wang, 2017). In the United States, the survey of college-level enrollments in languages other than English, conducted by the Modern Language Association, estimated that there was a total of 53,069 Chinese learners in 2016 (Looney & Lusin, 2018). Comparatively, the National K–12 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey (American Councils for International Education, 2017) estimated a total of 227,086 students enrolled in CFL programs at all levels across the United States in 2014–2015 (p. 8). However, as Li (2018) pointed out, the trend of CFL learners becoming younger in age has attracted more media attention than research effort. Therefore, the gap between the number of students in CFL classrooms and those represented in current literature on foreign language learning is one of the motivations for the current study.
In recent years, Chinese immersion programs have proliferated across the United States, especially at the primary school (kindergarten to fifth grade, henceforth, K–5) level; this alternative form of education has been hailed as a much more effective way of acquiring advanced-level foreign language skills than traditional foreign language programs. Like other foreign language immersion programs in the United States and around the world, Chinese immersion is a form of choice-based educational program through which children learn school subjects in Chinese no less than 50% of their school day. Different from other forms of foreign language learning available in US elementary schools such as the language exploratory classes (e.g., Curtain, Donato, & Gilbert, 2016), foreign language immersion programs offer the promise of additive bilingualism, maintenance and development of biliteracy skills, academic achievement at or above grade level, as well as development of cultural or multicultural competence (e.g., Johnson & Swain, 1997; Tedick & Wesely, 2015). However, as I will further elaborate later in the book, there are still quite a few gaps in the field of language immersion research; most notably, there is a soaring lack of research in the context of one-way immersion (i.e., foreign language immersion; the term is more carefully defined in Chapter 2, Tedick & Wesely, 2015); few studies to date have involved a language that employs an orthographically different language (Fortune, 2012). This is another primary motivation for the present study.
Purpose of the Book
This volume focuses on a 50-50 Chinese (Mandarin) immersion program offered within an elementary, kindergarten to fifth grade public school in a large urban district in the United States. Ultimately, this book hopes to present research-based evidence to those who are involved in immersion education of young children and to provide an opportunity for educators, parents, and researchers to compare, contrast, and connect their own experiences with the program described in this volume, and by doing so, this book will allow for and deepen our understanding of why programs function the way they do. More specifically, the purposes of the book are threefold:
First, this book seeks to describe, identify, and explain the child-internal and child-external factors that affect children’s biliteracy learning. Of late, reading researchers have become increasingly interested in biliteracy learning, however, most of the reading theories are built on monolingual reading which cannot adequately explain the complexity of dual-language involvement in biliteracy learning (Koda, 2008). Additionally, to date, the majority of biliteracy studies involve learners of alphabetic language pairs, such as Spanish/French and English (e.g., Melby-Lervåg & Lervåg, 2011). The growing body of biliteracy studies involving contrasting writing systems, such as Chinese and English, are focused on Chinese children in a Chinese-speaking region learning to read Chinese as their first language (L1) and English as a foreign/second language (FL/L2) (e.g., Mcbride-Chang et al., 2008; Shu, Peng, & McBride-Chang, 2008) or on Chinese immigrant children in North America learning to read Chinese as a heritage language (CHL), which is ancillary in essence, and English as their L2 (e.g., Koda, Lü, & Zhang, 2008). Therefore, this book offers new evidence to the growing body of biliteracy research by incorporating Chinese learners in an immersion setting as a case of biliteracy learners whose backgrounds, context of learning, and learning experiences are different from those represented in current research.
Second, this volume also seeks to understand the process of children’s literacy learning in the partner language. 4 One of the important goals of an immersion program of any language is its effectiveness in helping children become bilingual and biliterate. Studies concerning immersion programs of various types converge on the same finding regarding their societal language and literacy development, which is, those in immersion programs performed as well as, or sometimes better than, their counterparts in non-immersion programs (e.g., Genesee & Lindholm-Leary, 2013; Steele et al., 2017). What we know much less is how children develop literacy skills in the partner language, and to what extent they are becoming biliterate (e.g., Fortune & Song, 2016; Hopewell & Escamilla, 2014). Therefore, this volume hopes to contribute...