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| Jennie Lee uses lots of body language to encourage Jennessa Ma and her classmates to learn Cantonese at West Portal Elementary in San Francisco. |
When Jennie Lee greeted her kindergartners on their first day of school, most of them did not understand a single word she said.
“歡迎來到學校” she said in Cantonese, which translates as “Welcome to school.” The children looked at her blankly, nonetheless charmed by her warm smile and contagious enthusiasm.
As the days went by and the class continued in Cantonese, students became increasingly frustrated. Some told her — in plain English — that she should speak English. Some told her she was boring. Some children confided to other students that their teacher was speaking a special “kindergarten” language all its own.
“Why can’t you speak English?” they would often ask her. “We don’t understand you.” She would answer them — always smiling — in Cantonese.
To be a successful teacher in a dual immersion program, Lee always speaks in Cantonese. She knows that if she gives in to temptation — even once — her students will tune her out and always expect answers in English. If her students need occasional translation, they must ask a parent volunteer for help.
That’s not to say she isn’t empathetic. When Lee, who is Chinese, arrived from Vietnam at age 14, she too was forced to learn a new language. And she knows that while it might be rough in the beginning, her students will thank her later.
Everything — math, art and science — is taught in Chinese, with the exception of English-language arts, which takes up 20 percent of total instruction time. For that time, two immersion teachers switch classes with her. The ratio of English increases gradually until, by fourth grade, instruction is split 50-50 between the two languages.
“It’s very challenging,” says Lee, who teaches a K-1 Cantonese immersion class at West Portal Elementary School in San Francisco. “I cannot be boring in the beginning because I don’t want to turn them off. So we do a lot of games in Chinese. We sing ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ in Chinese and play Duck Duck Goose. But every year, I forget how tough it is in the beginning — not only for children, but also for parents who don’t know how to help.”
To make things easier, Lee uses lots of body language and puppets, and repeats everything nonstop. And like teachers since the beginning of time, she uses food as an incentive.
“When we go out for snacks and have cookies, I will ask every single one of them, ‘Do you want a cookie?’ and they must say yes or no in Chinese,” says Lee, a member of United Educators of San Francisco. “With 20 kids I’ll repeat it 20 times. It’s the same thing if I ask them if they want water or if they have to use the bathroom. I have to repeat everything 20 times, but in a few weeks, the kids get it. Repetition is the key.”
After about five weeks, Lee’s endless patience pays off and her kindergartners begin to catch on. It helps to have first-graders in the class who serve as role models, prattling in Cantonese with ease.
“The beauty of young kids learning another language is that they are very flexible,” says Lee, who has taught at the school within a school at West Portal Elementary for 12 years and now serves as a mentor for the district’s Mandarin immersion program at other school sites. “They seem to observe and learn very quickly. We use characters and are not alphabet centered, so in the beginning they have to follow certain strokes in order. The characters are hard to write, so lots of kids prefer reading and speaking to writing.”
Lee’s students come from diverse backgrounds. Some are white and learning Cantonese as a second language. Students who are Vietnamese and Hispanic are learning Cantonese as a third language. And she has Chinese students whose parents speak English at home, but want their children to learn the language of their ancestors.
Elaine Chin, whose son Josiah is a first-grader in the class, comments that Chinese is not spoken at the family’s home. “But now Josiah speaks better Chinese than me and even laughs at me when I try to speak it,” she says proudly.
To reflect the diversity of the school’s population, students study various cultures in addition to Chinese and American culture. They may compare Ramadan to the Chinese New Year or hear presentations on Korea, Indonesia and Russia. Children march in San Francisco’s Chinese New Year parade and perform traditional fan dances, lion dances and ribbon dances. There is also a school-wide parade for the Chinese Moon Festival.
But being in an immersion program is not all fun and games. Students have double the homework. And it’s a great deal of work for Lee to meet all of the state’s standards for both grade levels mostly in a language that is not spoken at home. And having another class for English-language arts instruction is even more work.
But she firmly believes that it will be worth it because her students will have more doors open to them as bilingual adults. Now that Chinese has been included in the Advanced Placement program for high schools, her students can continue their immersion education in two of the district’s middle schools and one high school. The longer they are in an immersion program the better, she says.
“It’s tough in many ways. Immersion teachers teach more kids. I have 40 kids instead of 20, two curriculums, two sets of report cards and two grades. But I am lucky, because I also have double the rewards and double the number of students to love.”
