From Washington Dateline:

Chinese: The Up and Coming Language

By GIL KLEIN

WASHINGTON - Second grader Jaynie Carter doesn’t know it, but she is part of a hot new education trend.

Jaynie listened as her teacher, BiBi Kearney, listed what her pupils should be thankful for this Thanksgiving - family, teachers, country, school.

But the words Jaynie recited were jiating, loashi, guojia and xuexiao.

Jaynie was learning Chinese at Wolftrap Elementary School in Vienna, Va. in a program started this year in the first and second grades and slated to expand every year until she graduates from high school fluent in the language.

“Gan en jie kuai le,” the children in her class chanted. Happy Thanksgiving.

Just as Russian was the hot language in the 1960s and Japanese in the 1980s, now many schools are answering the demands of students and parents - and the federal government — to offer Chinese.

The drive reflects China’s emergence as the world’s rising economic power.

Chinese is so new in American public schools and the numbers are changing so quickly that no one knows how many schools are teaching it.

“I get a call almost every week about a school adding Chinese to the curriculum,” said Marty Abbott, director of education for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign languages.

“We did a survey (of high schools) in 2000 and Chinese was not a blip on the radar screen,” he said. “Now we estimate somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 kids are taking Chinese in high school, middle school and even some elementary schools.”

The College Board, the company that produces Advanced Placement tests for high school students, surveyed 14,000 high schools this year and asked if they wanted AP tests in Japanese, Italian, Russian and Chinese. Less than 100 wanted Russian, fewer than 200 Japanese, and Italian clocked in at 240.

But 2,400 public schools said they wanted Chinese.

“None of us could believe it,” said Tom Matts, director of the College Board’s World Languages Initiative. A spot check of many of the high school Web sites found that they didn’t even offer Chinese, much less have students capable of taking the advanced tests.

“What it tells us is there is an incredibly growing interest in the study of Chinese,” he said. “Are there going to be 2,400 schools that offer it in 2006? No. But by 2010 I bet there are.”

Certified teachers are at a premium.

“All of the qualified teachers are already teaching,” said Yu-lan Lin, of the Chinese Language Association of Secondary/Elementary Schools.

Public schools in areas with large Chinese-American populations may be able to certify teachers who now work in weekend “heritage schools” that teach language and culture to children of immigrants.

But large parts of the country have few qualified Chinese teachers.

After 10 U.S. state education officials visited Beijing in June, the Chinese government created a program to send bilingual Chinese teachers to the United States and to help fund the College Board’s AP Chinese test.

Six states, as well as some school districts, arranged for Chinese teachers this school year. Connecticut is leading the way with five.

The Chinese government provides pocket money for the teachers and airfare to the United States, said Mary Ann Hansen, world languages consultant for the Connecticut Department of Education. The school districts provide room, board and local transportation.

“Parents and kids invited the teachers to weekends in New York, ski trips, Thanksgiving dinners, and holidays,” Hansen said. “It became a community effort.”

In Kentucky, the one Chinese teacher provided by the government is helping create an on-line basic Chinese course that can be offered to high school students statewide.

In Congress, Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., introduced a bill to authorize $1.3 billion over five years to encourage Chinese language training in American schools.

“The rise of China comes with a whole set of challenges,” Lieberman said. “But the ability to talk to and understand each other should not be among them.”

Seeing a critical need for Chinese-language experts in the government, the Defense Department launched its own program.

This year 20 kindergartners in Portland, Ore., began learning Chinese through a partnership the department created with the University of Portland and Portland city schools. Federal support for those students’ Chinese training will continue through college.

“Our expectation is they will come to work for the government with far more knowledge about China, an ability to speak the language and understand its nuances and not do dumb things because we don’t understand the culture.”

At Wolftrap Elementary, teacher BiBi Kearney, a native Chinese who taught in the Fairfax County school system for 15 years before the Chinese-language program started. Now she teaches the students Chinese for two 30-minute sessions a week.

This week, she presented each of her students with a card with the student’s name written boldly in Chinese characters.

“Oh, thank you,” said one boy, holding his card carefully. “That’s the most wonderful thing you ever gave me.”

Gil Klein is a national correspondent in Media General’s

Ken Carroll 凯恩