Great Cultural Opportunity for all kids, especially Mandarin DLI families!

We recently received this announcement from the Taiwanese Chamber of Commerce of Greater Salt Lake and would like to share it with you:

We are honored to have a group of orphans from Africa to come here to perform for free at Jordan High School in Sandy on 7/28.

The group will perform Chinese and African songs, dance, and Chinese martial arts

We need you or your PTA’s help to spread the word to your students and their families to come and watch this free performance to support these kids.

Here is a little background about this group:

These African orphans are sponsored and cared for by the Amitofo Charity Center, a Taiwanese charity in Africa.

The Amitofo Care Center (A.C.C.) (Amitofo Charity Center), which is comprised of an administration center, children’s dormitories, youth dormitories, preparatory school, kindergarten, library, activity center, medical center, vocational training center, religious center, CBO, etc. is founded and directed by Buddhist clergy from the East with an aspiration and mission to directly rear and care for orphans of Africa within the humanitarian and educational umbrella.

ACC’s compassionate and philanthropic foot-prints have been left not only in South Africa but also in Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, Lilongwe, Namibia, Mozambique, Bloemfontein, etc. As well as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia, and several United State countries. The total of orphans that ACC has adopted to date number around 8,000.

Heather Mangan

TCCGSL volunteer/director/treasurer

(801) 707-1219

Email: thmangan@hotmail.com

Please take the National Mandarin immersion parent survey

We invite you to take ten minutes to take the first-ever national survey of Mandarin immersion families. Our goal is to help programs nationwide better understand what parents want out of these programs and how they’re doing.

The link is:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QWQTTNV

So before you head off to summer fun, take a moment to think about how the year in your Mandarin immersion school has gone.

The survey is being conducted by a Ph.D. language researcher and a long-time Mandarin immersion parent and writer. We are:

Jeongwoon Kim, a Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow studying language acquisition at Kyunghee University, Korea. She earned her Ph.D. in Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University.

and

Elizabeth Weise, a parent of two children who’ve been in Mandarin immersion a total of 14 years now. She is the author of A Parent’s Guide to Mandarin Immersion and lives in San Francisco, California. She is also the creator of the
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council website at http://www.miparentscouncil.org.

Our goal is to gather information about why families choose Mandarin immersion and what their experiences are once their children are attending the program.

We’ll submit the resulting academic article to the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association. Upon publication, we will also post a non-academic, parent-focused article in Weise’s blog.

There are just 35 questions. It takes between 5 – 10 minutes to complete.

We also ask that you please pass it along to other families you know who have students in Mandarin immersion, as well as families who have left Mandarin immersion programs. Ideally we’d like to have most of the programs in the country represented. If you’ve got a school or program list serve, please send it along!

Again, that link is:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QWQTTNV

Thank you!