Chinese Literacy Learning in an Immersion Program

This book examines one-way foreign language immersion education in the United States. It provides a clear and rich description of a Chinese (Mandarin) immersion program, its curriculum, instructional materials, assessment activities, parental involvement and student outcomes. The author analyses two studies that document the development of the students' reading skills in English and Chinese, and the progress of their vocabulary knowledge, lexical inference, and reading comprehension in Chinese. In addition, this book contextualizes the program in its eco-system, including its neighbourhood, school, and the school district, and discusses the importance of school leadership, parental involvement, neighbourhood support and language acquisition planning in making an innovative school program successful. Its concluding chapters offer recommendations for program- and classroom-level practices and suggest pathways for future research on biliteracy learning in Chinese one-way immersion programs. This book will appeal in particular to students and scholars of applied linguistics, second language acquisition and language education.

Explores the learning of Chinese as a non-native language among schoolchildren in Chinese immersion education Examines factors affecting children's biliteracy learning in English and Chinese, literacy skills acquisition and content area learning in Chinese Provides data to measure key components of the students' early language and literacy development in both Chinese and English Offers recommendations for program- and classroom-level practices and suggests pathways for future research involving school age Chinese-English learners in a one-way immersion setting

Autorentext
Chan Lü is Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Linguistics in Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, USA.

Inhalt

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: One-way Immersion and Mandarin Immersion in the United States.- Chapter 3: Theoretical framework, literature review, and the current project.- Chapter 4: Pacific Elementary School.- Chapter 5: Chinese language, orthography, and learning to read.- Chapter 6: Properties of School Chinese.- Chapter 7: Oral language, phonological awareness, word reading and passage reading comprehension in Grade 2.- Chapter 8: Morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, lexical inference and text comprehension in Chinese in Grade 3.- Chapter 9: Implications for Chinese literacy learning and instruction in Chinese OWI programs: A proposal.- Chapter 10: Recommendation for program-level practices and future research agenda.