The New York Times has published at least one article about learning Chinese every week for the past several weeks.  The world is beginning to recognize the importance of learning Chinese.  I hope you sign up for a free demo lesson so you can see why we’re the best online Chinese school for you and for the Chinese language!  Below I have copy/pasted an excerpt from this week’s NYTimes Opinion section:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/will-americans-really-learn-chinese/

We’d Better Learn It

Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, served as a sociologist at the World Bank. He is the author of “Standardized Childhood.”

Imagine that your monthly mortgage bill arrives, unremarkable except that it’s suddenly written in Mandarin. Then, your bank sends over a Chinese translator to explain that you are falling deeper into debt. Mind-boggling? Well, this is America’s contemporary predicament as the Chinese finance a growing share of our national debt. Beijing holds $1.8 trillion in U.S. bonds and other instruments of borrowing. We are fused at the hip with the Chinese, economically speaking.

So, we better get to know them. They certainly want to know us, sending over hundreds of teachers to spark our children’s interest in Mandarin and East Asian ways. Affluent urban parents get it. (One San Francisco colleague felt compelled to apologize that his 6-year-old daughter had access only to a dual-language Spanish-speaking school, rather than to the Mandarin immersion he wanted.) But unlike Europe, the U.S. has no coherent strategy for making our society bilingual, unless you count our growing Babel of texting as a second tongue.

We are pathetically slow in realizing that East Asia will soon dominate the global economy. We believe, as did the last living Romans, that the American empire will reign forever. So, we fail to grasp the hard work, collective spirit and enormous investment in public institutions advanced by Chinese citizens.

September 27, 2009

New languages more foreign to U.S. students

CINCINNATI (AP) — American students are falling far behind their international counterparts in learning second languages, creating economic disadvantages for U.S. businesses and raising national security concerns.

Virtually all European and Asian elementary students study a second language, but 97 percent of Ohio and Kentucky students do not because their schools don’t offer it

American companies lose an estimated $2 billion each year because of employees’ inadequate language skills and poor cultural competence, according to the Committee for Economic Development in Washington, D.C.

“It’s always been a good thing to know more about the world and to speak another language, but now it’s become an issue of our economic security, our national security and our public diplomacy,” says committee President Charles Kolb. “Speaking a second language gives our young people an edge in terms of the competition we’re facing around the globe. Believe me, you win kudos if you’re negotiating in another country and you’re fluent in that language.”

The U.S. State and Defense departments have called languages like Arabic and Farsi critical to national security and economic development, and are infusing $750 million into their study.

Some Ohio schools have added Chinese, Japanese and Russian, but language experts say it doesn’t make up for the fact that the country’s approach to language education has been too little, too late and too disjointed.

Fewer than 2,600 of Ohio’s 320,000 juniors and seniors take Advanced Placement tests in a foreign language, “a sign that most students do not commit to the most challenging, long-term study of a foreign language,” said a 2007 report by Ohio’s Foreign Language Advisory Council.

Five decades of research shows kids learn a second language best when they study it early, and over an extended period. But fewer than 5 percent of elementary students in Ohio and the U.S. have access to a foreign language program, and the average high school language student studies only two years.

“As a nation, we don’t put our money where research and good practice tell us to,” says Kathryn Lorenz, associate professor of French at the University of Cincinnati. “We know that students who start language study early do much better than those who start in high school.”

Other countries have emphasized the importance of their students becoming bilingual and multilingual speakers by requiring foreign languages in primary school. Longer school days or years often help make the language studies possible.

Neither Ohio nor Kentucky requires foreign language for high school graduation, and neither state includes it on statewide exams.

Ohio’s education department and Legislature have debated requiring foreign language education for many years, but run into funding and staffing obstacles, said Deborah Robinson, world languages consultant for the Ohio Department of Education.

“One of the big issues is teacher capacity,” she said. “Ohio graduates around 200 to 225 foreign language teachers per year, but doesn’t produce even enough Spanish teachers to meet the need, let alone Chinese or Arabic.”

China, meanwhile, is making English a priority. Officials are recruiting native English speaker to teach the language to kindergartners.

Each year, 20 million more Chinese learn English, a trend that experts believe will lead to there being more Chinese English speakers than native English speakers by 2029.

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Information from: The Cincinnati Enquirer, http://www.enquirer.com

According to the New York Times Bits blog, a recent study funded by the US Department of Education (PDF) found that on the whole, online learning environments actually led to higher tested performance than face-to-face learning environments. “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction,” concluded the report’s authors in their key findings.

The report looked at just under one hundred studies that compared the performance of students in online learning environments (or courses with an online study component) to those who were given strictly face-to-face instruction for the same courses. What they found was that students who completed all or some of their coursework online tested on average in the 59th percentile, compared to the 50th percentile for those who received only classroom instruction, and that the results are statistically significant.

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Online Education on the Horizon

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While the study certainly provides a vote of confidence for online learning, it’s important to note that it doesn’t necessarily demonstrate that online learning is more effective as a medium than classroom learning. “In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that produced the observed learning advantages,” writes the authors of the report (emphasis theirs). “At the same time, one should note that online learning is much more conducive to the expansion of learning time than is face-to-face instruction.”

In other words: all things are not equal. Students spending three hours per day in an online environment under the guidance of a great professor are likely, and not surprisingly, going to be better prepared than those spending an hour per week in a classroom with a mediocre one. And because the study’s results were correlational and not causal, it is impossible to say for certain whether it was actually the online learning environment that caused better tested performance. We can conclude that those in online learning environments tested better, but not necessarily why.

Further, the meta-study did not look at enough K-12 research to draw any conclusions — simply because it doesn’t exist. Researchers warned that “various online learning implementation practices may have differing effectiveness for K–12 learners than they do for older students,” which seems plausible. A major part of the job of a good educator is to equip students with the necessary mental tools to be able to continue learning on their own. Those skills are likely to be less developed in younger students, making face-to-face teacher intervention more necessary.

So while the classroom is ultimately here to stay, we can probably safely assume that there will be more use of online learning tools in the future. In that case, what might online education look like?

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The Framework for Taking School Online

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As part of their research, SRI International, which conducted the study for the DoE, constructed a conceptual framework of the different types of online education. They broke learning down into three types: expository (learners receive information via digital means), active (learners build knowledge by manipulating online tools), interactive (learners build knowledge through collaborative interaction).

Until recently, online learning has mainly been of the expository sort, essentially a traditional lecture format adapted for the web. But newer, social and multimedia technologies are allowing online tools to evolve to offer more active and interactive lessons. No longer is online learning just reading a module and answering questions — it can now include synchronous or asynchronous discussions and peer-to-peer learning exercises. As a result, online learning is becoming a more useful tool as both a replacement for and enhancement to traditional face-to-face learning.

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The Teacher of the Future

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a post called In the Future, the Cost of Education Will Be Zero. In it, I argued that online learning technologies and open source materials have the potential to drive the cost of a quality education down very close to free and provide access to learning opportunities for people who otherwise couldn’t afford it. The post stimulated a lot of great discussion and debate.

Some people thought it was great that web technologies and open source and Creative Commons licensing concepts were enabling the playing field to become more level. Others accused me of advocating the closure of all schools (not quite what I was getting at), or that I was painting teachers as an unnecessary aspect of the learning process (for the record, my brother and my fiancé are high school teachers, my sister-in-law runs summer and after school education programs, and both my parents have worked in the public schools — I don’t want any of them to lose their jobs).

But that does raise a good question: what happens to teachers if more education moves online?

As it turns out, not very much. The word education, after all, comes from the Latin educare, which means, “to lead out.” I.e., think Socrates. Anyone can absorb information from a book or video, but good teachers will always be necessary to draw out that knowledge and help students develop the skills needed to think critically about the information they consume. In other words, online learning tools are just like any other tools in a teacher’s bag of tricks: what matters is how they’re applied. The instruction of good teachers will be made better by the proper application of web tools, while bad teachers won’t necessarily be made better by utilizing online education methods.

It comes down to knowing how to best use the tools at your disposal to maximize the impact of education for students, which has always been what separates good teachers from bad ones. The major difference between teachers of today and teachers of the future is that in the future educators will have better online tools and will require better specialized training to learn how to utilize them properly.

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Conclusion

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Teachers will certainly need to adapt in order to use new tools and methods, but that’s nothing new. Online education may never completely replace face-to-face learning, though as the Department of Education study shows, with enough time and under the guidance of a good teacher, online learning environments can produce results that are just as good or better than classroom learning. Online learning is likely to be used more often to enhance face-to-face learning in the future, however, and in communities where classroom learning is infeasible due to lack of funds, online learning is an adequate stand-in.

I recently talked to Shai Reshef of the University of the People, an online-only institution aiming to bring quality education to students, mostly in developing nations, for whom cost is a prohibitive barrier to traditional classroom learning. Reshef told me that his University really acts as a guide, helping people to organize the types of knowledge discovery and peer-to-peer teaching activities they’re already doing into a more formal program of study. And does the University of the People model still have room for teachers? You bet.

Even though most of the courses offered by the school can be completed without the intervention of a professor, teachers are still necessary to provide help and guidance when needed and to create courseware. In fact, over 800 professors from around the world have already volunteered their services to the University of the People.

For Reshef, online learning is a way to bring quality education to the masses. Teachers will always be a part of the equation, and online learning is just another tool at their disposal.

New studies are showing that online learning edges over traditional learning methods!

I personally haven’t read the report myself, but I can testify that learning Chinese online has great advantages over learning Chinese in a traditional setting.  Among other benefits, when students learn Chinese using a computer, they practice the “type-to-learn” method which is one of the most effective ways to learn how to read Chinese characters.  In the digital age, typing in Chinese and reading Chinese on computers is of utmost importance.  Everything is done by email nowadays, especially when communicating internationally.  On another note, talking to a teacher who is physically located in China while she delivers the lesson adds excitement to the lesson as well.  It’s pretty cool to be able to talk to someone who’s experienced modern China and ask her all sorts of questions about their culture, society, economy, lifestyle, and nuances that Americans will never be able to truly learn about just by reading blogs or newspaper articles.  If you haven’t experienced Mando Mandarin lessons yet, then you haven’t yet realized that learning Chinese has become lots of fun.  What are you waiting for?

-Mike Cheng

Founder, Mando Mandarin

Article Below From: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/24bits-002.html?_r=1

Learning Online May Be Better

A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Education Department, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

The report examined the comparative research for online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.

Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Education Department found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools.

The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are tailored more to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.

Philip R. Regier, the dean of Arizona State University’s Online and Extended Campus program, sees things evolving fairly rapidly, accelerated by the increasing use of social networking technology. More and more, students will help and teach one another, he said.

“The technology will be used to create learning communities among students in new ways,” Mr. Regier said. “People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.”

COMMENT Isn’t it a self-selecting group that would want to learn online? Could this be a reason why those taking online courses do better? There’s a certain drive and motivation necessary to force yourself to learn something you don’t have to. — KV, Aug. 19

I’d like to share with you some exciting news from Congress (July 15, 2009)

Keep an eye out in 2009-2010 as Mando Mandarin begins its expansion into schools throughout America!

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July 15, 8:33 PM

WASHINGTON – A bill pending in Congress would dramatically expand Mandarin Chinese language classes for American students. The measure, the U.S.-China Language Engagement Act, would award competitive grants to schools to “establish, expand or improve” Chinese language and cultural classes. It also expands technology options to help American schools establish “virtual connections” with schools in China.
Please click on this link to read more:
http://www.examiner.com/x-15615-Asia-Headlines-Examiner~y2009m7d15-Congress-targets-Chinese-language-education

If you have been considering taking Chinese lessons with us, now is the time to sign up! We are still offering 1-on-1 lessons at a flat rate of only $15 per hour! Sign up now before prices go up in the Fall of 2009! Try a free trial lesson by clicking here: http://www.mandomandarin.com/contact/free-trial-lesson.html

Regards,
Mike Cheng
Founder & President of Mando Mandarin

Web:      http://www.mandomandarin.com
Office:    (888) 516-2636
Direct:    (347) 374-1006

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Mando Mandarin provides schools with turnkey courses in Chinese as a foreign language taught by live instructors at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time teachers.  We guarantee that our students will be able to have conversations in Chinese after only 36 lesson hours.

At present, our certified teachers have taught over 10,000 combined lesson hours.  Be a Mando. Speak Chinese in 36 hours guaranteed.

Bull Market in Chinese Teachers Hits Wall Street Just in Time

By Janet Frankston Lorin

Source: Bloomberg News

July 24 (Bloomberg) — When the Yonkers, New York, public schools sought to hire a Chinese-language teacher, Superintendent Bernard Pierorazio expected to fill the job within weeks. He was off by two years.

Schools in the U.S. face a shortage of instructors in Chinese, stymieing efforts to prepare pupils for careers tied to China, the world’s fastest-growing economy. The Schenectady, New York, schools will require only a third of pupils in grades 5 and 6 to take Chinese because the district couldn’t find instructors for all the students, Ron Hamelin, world-languages coordinator, said in an interview on July 18.

Programs to teach Chinese in grades K through 12 have almost tripled since 2004 to at least 779, say the Asia Society and the College Board, two New York-based nonprofits. Americans fluent in Chinese will be needed for finance, business, diplomacy and security agencies, according to the U.S. Defense Department’s National Security Education Program.

“The need for Chinese has come to us in a flash,” said Jacque Bott Van Houten, who oversees foreign languages for the Kentucky Department of Education, in Frankfort. “We haven’t had longstanding programs at any level to teach Chinese, and all of a sudden we’re called upon to produce a plethora of teachers.”

The openings in schools coincide with the loss of 94,000 jobs in the securities industry worldwide in the past year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The bull market for Chinese-language teachers may not appeal to those thrown out of work in the current financial market turmoil.

First-Graders

“It is highly unlikely former Wall Streeters fluent in Chinese would turn to teaching,” said Donald Straszheim, vice chairman of Roth Capital Partners in Los Angeles and former chief economist of Merrill Lynch & Co. in New York, in a July 21 e-mail. “The pay differentials would be prohibitive.”

Demand to teach Mandarin, the main Chinese dialect, is popping up all over the U.S. The private, all-girls Brearley School in New York, which charges a $33,000-a-year tuition, will start teaching Chinese to all 50 first-graders in September, adding to instruction for grades 5 to 12, Stephanie Hull, head of the school, said in an interview on July 2.

The Benjamin Logan Local Schools, a public system near Bellefontaine in central Ohio, began teaching Chinese in elementary classes last year, after dropping French in 2006 for lack of demand. Chinese will be mandatory in grades K through 4, starting in August, to help prepare students for future jobs other than at the region’s Honda engine, automobile and motorcycle plants, said curriculum director Emmy Davis-Smith in an interview on July 14.

Acquiring Words

Parent Kelli LeVan said Chinese may give her daughter Baylie, 7, and son Brock, 8, an edge when they apply to college or for jobs.

“They talked all the time about the new words that they learned,” LeVan, 38, said in interview on July 18. “Hopefully, they’ll continue the program to have that advantage.”

While the Chinese-language curricula have spread, they reach only a fraction of the more than 97,000 public schools counted by the National Center for Educational Statistics, a Washington-based U.S. agency.

“If you go the route of assuming that everyone speaks English and you don’t know other languages, we put ourselves at a distinct competitive disadvantage,” Robert Slater, director of the National Security Education Program, in an interview on June 19. The program provides scholarships allowing college students to learn languages, such as Mandarin and Arabic, that are deemed critical to U.S. interests.

Kentucky’s Rules

To get certification to teach Chinese in public schools, applicants need more than proficiency in the language. The No Child Left Behind U.S. education law adopted six years ago made hiring harder by requiring institutions that receive federal funding to employ candidates with state certification, said Van Houten in Kentucky.

The requirements vary among the 50 states. In Kentucky, teachers need a bachelor’s degree, must pass a national examination for teachers, and have to complete special classes tailored to Mandarin, Van Houten said in an interview on July 17.

Yonkers, with 24,200 students, started its Chinese-language program in 2006. A Mandarin-speaking math teacher filled the first post on a temporary basis, coaching 30 students. Pierorazio, after his two-year search, hired a teacher through a plan sponsored by the College Board and a Chinese-government agency in Beijing. The new employee will work with 125 to 200 elementary and middle-school students.

CUNY’s Dozen

The instructor will be one of 193 that have been recruited from China to work in 32 states, said Selena Cantor, director of the College Board’s Chinese Language Culture Initiative, in an interview on July 9. Yonkers will pay for housing and transportation while the Chinese government picks up the salary.

While as many as 30 U.S. colleges have begun to produce teachers who qualify for a state credential in Chinese, the supply isn’t large enough, according to Van Houten.

In September, the City University of New York’s Hunter College will begin a two-year master’s degree and certificate program in Mandarin, with as many as 12 students annually, said Der-lin Chao, an associate professor of Chinese.

The dozen a year won’t go far in addressing the “dramatic” shortage, she said in an interview on July 18.

“We will not have enough speakers of Chinese to deal with interests in business, law and national security, critical for our country, and we will lose competitiveness to other countries,” Chao said. “Our kids will fall behind.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Janet Frankston Lorin in New York jlorin@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 24, 2008 00:01 EDT

Important Things to Consider When Learning Chinese

by Praveen Sequira

So you want to learn to speak Chinese, but aren’t sure which course is paramount for you? With thousands of websites vying with each other to offer the ‘best’, it’s hard to decide which one is the right one for you.

While researching the Chinese language courses, there are a few questions you must ask yourself. First, you need to identify the reason for learning the language. If you are looking for how to learn Chinese fast, then probably you are planning to use it only on a vacation and no more. If you are a student and want to use it for academics, then you would need to learn both spoken Chinese language and writing skills. If you are a businessman, then probably you’d need a comprehensive knowledge of business vocabulary and be able to communicate in writing.

Pricing probably is going to be the largest factor while considering a Chinese language course. Luckily, you can even learn Chinese for free on some sites. But in most cases, while cheap may not be the best option, higher-cost courses do not necessarily mean better training either. Instead you should look for other peripherals and benefits attached with the courses.

Look for the size of classes, student-teacher ratio, and facility of one-on-one interaction with the faculty. Find out whether they offer customized courses and flexible timings along with audio and video lessons around the clock or not. Other things to watch out for are the time allocated for interactive lessons as well as independent studies and if they have any innovative methods to make learning Chinese easier. Mando Mandarin (http://www.mandomandarin.com) offers 1-on-1 learning with certified teachers who live in China. If you are unsure if learning Chinese online is the best method for you, you might want to try out the free lessons that they offer.

When choosing an online school, do also take into consideration how long the website has been around and whether it is an established name offline as well. It’s easy to set up fancy websites but without good content they would find it hard to last long. Also programs which have been around for a longer time, have the advantage of knowing what works best through the previous students feedback.

Another factor that distinguishes the various online Chinese speaking courses on offer is their choice of faculty. A good Chinese language content provider would always have native Chinese trainers who are certified. T hey should also have high experience levels and enough enthusiasm to guide you through all the problems you might face while learning a new language.

Identify the kind of learning style you’re most comfortable with. Are you the kind who can learn anything just by listening or watching it, or are you more comfortable with a book in front to guide you? Do you prefer a daily interaction with the teacher or are you happy learning at your own pace and occasional Chinese language conferences to help you answer your queries.

The Internet is a treasure trove of information and if you adhere to these guidelines, the path to your learning Chinese should be an easy glide. Watch yourself become a pro quickly and effectively with the online Chinese language courses that offer you all this and more.