In an effort to grant high schoolers an opportunity to learn Chinese before they enter college, ASU is offering a two-week program that fully immerses students in the country’s language and culture.
Startalk, which began June 7 and will end June 21, schedules students from 9 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. in language and cultural exercises as well as social events and activities.
Program manager Amy Tam said the popularity for Chinese is increasing, making it more beneficial for students to learn the language in their early years of mandatory foreign language classes.
“Chinese is a critical language that is becoming more widely accepted,” she said. “It’s just a popular language in general: China alone has one of the largest populations from around the world.”
Tam said she believes students find the language is easier to learn if they have had prior experience before beginning college.
“People think that Chinese might be a really difficult language, and I really do think it is, but I think, if they start at a young age, it’ll make it easier in the future,” she said. “They’ll probably go on to use it in their careers, too.”
The program’s 30 students came from 21 different schools in 14 different districts across Arizona and learn in three separate levels, depending on their own skill set.
“We try to set up the different levels to be very similar,” she said. “The difference is that, depending on what level you’re in, we’ll assign the same chapter, but the first level would deal with basic vocabulary and grammar structure while the higher levels would get more complex.”
Dominique Reichdnbach, Cactus Shadows High School graduate and level-three student at Startalk, said the program allows her to truly master her understanding of Chinese as a conversational tool.
“I really love being able to have an immersive language class because in school, when we study language, we take the class for an hour a day,” she said. “Here you come into class and you’re spoken to in Chinese for many hours of the day.”
Because Startalk encourages students to utilize the language they learn in order to communicate with their instructors and peers, Reichdnbach said the program is comparable to study abroad programs in China.
“Startalk is the closest thing you can get to a study abroad program in the United States,” she said. “They really do a great job of only speaking to you in Chinese and making you think in the language as an immersion experience.”
Program director Xia Vhang said the program is immersive by necessity –– students need to be completely surrounded by language they wish to speak in order to learn it.
According to national testing standards, the students who enter the program improve by a complete scale from the first day to the last day of the program.
“We provide a highly immersive program and it is intensive so that students can truly learn the Chinese language and culture,” she said. “Their language levels improve one scale on the national standard after they finish here. They achieve a lot.”
In order to ensure that the students’ experience is successful in immersing students into a foreign language and culture, Vhang said the program requires organization and upkeep.
“Running the program has been tough for me,” she said. “This is a 24-hour day, seven days a week for 14 days –– no break.”
However, Vhang said witnessing the students’ improvements has made running the program worthwhile.
“But the thing is, after all that time, you see the students come out with all that progress,” she said. “That gets me really really excited. People love this program year after year.”
Reach the reporter at aplante@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @aimeenplante
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