US K-12 immersion schools expand across country for early-age Chinese language education

At the Goodtime Chinese School in the Bethany suburb of Portland, Oregon, an American child stops school director Zhou Yanzhuo, of China, in the hallway to ask a question in English. She requests that he speak in Chinese and the third grader, who has no Chinese heritage, handily switches languages.

The child is one of several dozen students attending rigorous summer classes for Chinese language instruction at an age when experts believe language acquisition is easiest.

While American universities report that Chinese language enrolment is flat, Chinese language immersion courses at the K-12 level are growing. The families of students without Chinese backgrounds cite long-term professional value or a chance to sharpen overall ability to learn languages as their motivations for enrolment.

“Chinese is a major language, meaning that it’s an advantage to their children’s future development,” said Shu Bingyi, Zhou’s husband and founder of the school, a K-5 campus that charges US$14,000 per year for full-time immersion classes.

The couple said more than half of their current cohort of 100 kindergarteners have no Chinese background, a record for the school.

The number of Chinese language immersion schools for students between kindergarten and high school reached a record this year since the first one opened in 1981, and that there were now 397 across the US, according to Elizabeth Weise, who runs a blog for parents of children in Chinese language immersion instruction.