Story and photos
by Paula Poortinga
The new Chinese Immersion School that opened this semester at the De Avila campus becomes the fifth Chinese Immersion Program in the city, providing a rigorous but fun academic program taught in English and Cantonese that endows children with the confidence and tools they will need to succeed in today’s society. Students in the program are immersed in a diverse, multilingual classroom setting, which serves to give them wider perspective and deepen their understanding of the world around them.
Located at 1250 Waller Street, the program currently hosts Kindergarten and First Grade. However, they are expected to add one grade each year, progressively. Depending on capacity allowance and the plans of the school district, De Avila will eventually become either a Kindergarten through fifth grade or Kindergarten through eighth grade school.
On a recent visit De Avila’s halls are quiet, yet the students in the classrooms are active and engaged. Principal Rosina Tong walks into Ms. Moong’s First Grade classroom during a short break between lessons. Several students bound over to greet her, whipping their arms around her in an embrace, and speaking to her in Cantonese.
The teacher regains attention from her class. The next lesson is BINGO word recognition with Chinese characters, where the children demonstrate their impressive Cantonese cognition and speaking abilities.
“It’s phenomenal to me how much they can understand in just six weeks,” said Elizabeth, the parent of a Kindergartener at De Avila. At home, she says, her son sings songs in Cantonese, practicing his vocabulary, while also teaching some to his mom and little sister.
Grace, another parent of a De Avila Kindergartener, is first generation American with Chinese parents who immigrated to the U.S. She admits having hardly any ability to speak and understand Cantonese. Although she went to Chinese classes after school when she was just older than her son is now, not being immersed in the language made it difficult to learn.
“I chose the immersion program because I felt like it will really round things out for him, specifically for direction and the education I want for him,” Grace says.
“The teachers are incredibly animated [when teaching], and when they explain, they are trying to also connect as much non verbally,” Elizabeth says.
Since a number of the parents of the Immersion Program’s students don’t speak Cantonese, the school provides vocabulary sheets for parents that list what their children have been learning in school. Online sources are also available to parents through the De Avila website. Resources online are expanding to include web activities linked to other school websites, such as the Urban High School.
Principal Tong says that the teachers, especially in the lower grades, start language immersion simply, identifying classroom objects, teaching basic functions and commands, and construct the language immersion so students can learn and build their language skills gradually and simultaneously with other lessons. She says that beyond being an immersion school they are “just like a regular elementary school,” and their students have “joyful learning” in all subjects.
In the current classrooms, eighty percent of the curriculum is taught in Cantonese with the remainder in English. Higher grades will adjust the language ratio to include more English. By grade five, half of the curriculum will be taught in language immersion, half in English. Promoting language in this way builds a firm foundation of new language skills early, and the taper to an even balance establishes that subjects can be mastered in length and depth in both languages.
The Immersion Program at De Avila teaches Cantonese to students to model after the majority of the Chinese people in San Francisco, who predominantly speak Cantonese rather than Mandarin. However, Tong is hopeful, as they continue to expand, to include Mandarin as part of the curriculum.
As the Immersion Program at De Avila aspires to grow within their building, so is the larger immersion school corps in San Francisco. The West Portal Immersion Program is working closely with De Avila to figure out where the immersion students can continue their Chinese immersion on into middle school. Hoover Middle School has a Chinese Immersion Program, but is currently too small to accommodate all the incoming sixth through eighth graders.
Principal Tong has been pivotal communicating with the district what they’d like to accomplish at De Avila, Elizabeth says. There is concern amongst some parents and school representatives about expanding De Avila as much as capacity will yield, however they are being optimistic, and also smartly preparing for whatever may be decided by the district.
“I believe in myself and in my colleagues; we are going to make something happen,” Tong says. “We’ve reached where we are by collaboration with our parents, they really have been incredible.” This sentiment is overwhelmingly reciprocated from the parents about the administrators at the Immersion Program at De Avila.
Tong also expresses that she wants her school to be an active participant in the community, as well as build community partnerships with other Haight neighbors. “We are open to receive support and be supportive to them,” Tong says.
To learn more about the Chinese Immersion School at De Avila visit their website at www.cisdeavila.com.
