Support Mandarin as the 3rd DLI language in Park City.
Melissa Garland 0

Support Mandarin as the 3rd DLI language in Park City.

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Melissa Garland 0 Comments
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The State of Utah offers 3 language options for DLI:  Spanish, French and Mandarin.  Spanish is currently offered at PPES and French has just been approved for Trailside.  In considering a 3rd program for Park City, the School Board should make Mandarin the language choice for that program.

  • There are only a few "slots" of Mandarin language DLI remaining for the state of Utah; Park City should have one of them.
  • Park City should offer the variety of language choice to its parents.
  • Mandarin is, by a significant factor, the most widely-spoken language in the world. 
  • Unlike Latin-based languages (Spanish, French, English), Mandarin is a 'tonal' language, which means that being able to create and distinguish tones is essential to fluency.  It is a known that after a certain age, humans lose the ability to even perceive some tonal differences, making it nearly impossible to learn - to fluency - a language such as Mandarin.  Being native English speakers, our children will always have the ability to learn other Latin-based languages.  They have a very narrow window to actually learn tonal languages, such as Mandarin.

Sponsor

Melissa Garland

Links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
http://mlephil.wordpress.com/2010/11/01/why-mother-tongue-instruction-improves-achievement/

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