TandemPlus for Chinese Immersion Gap students and Native Speakers

The Language Center TandemPlus program and the department of Asian Languages and Literatures recently started a new initiative: coordinating and conducting conversation sessions for Chinese immersion gap students and native speakers of Chinese.

A couple years ago, Chinese immersion schools in Minnesota began to have graduates after eight years of bilingual training. Those students were fluent in Chinese and went on to regular high schools. Once entering high school however, most of them found no Chinese course that would suit them, because their Chinese language proficiency was so much higher than other students. Consequently, they became so-called “gap” students, meaning they have a gap of four years between graduating from immersion school and entering college. During these years, they often lack opportunities to communicate in Chinese. Students and their parents expressed concern that their Chinese language proficiency would slide down instead of going up if they had no opportunity to use the language.

On the other hand, on the University of Minnesota campus, there are more native speakers of Chinese who need help with their English than there are American students learning Chinese who would like to have a Chinese language partner. Consequently, TandemPlus has long been troubled by their inability to find language partners for international students from China.

Naturally, an idea came up: how about matching the Chinese immersion gap students with native speakers of Chinese at the university? We can kill two birds with one stone! Why not?

The two departments assessed the feasibility, discussed details, and assigned people to work on this project. At the meeting, it was also decided that the conversation sessions should be conducted once a week with 90 minutes each time. In order to benefit both groups of students, half of the time students would be speaking Chinese, and the other half in English.

The first conversation session was held on Thursday, September 28, 2017 and it was a great success. A total of 26 students came, about half of which were immersion graduates, and the other half native speakers of Chinese, as well as 3-4 chaperones. Since then, the conversation sessions have been going well. The lead instructor, Zhen Zou, has come up with more than a dozen topics which should be sufficient for this semester. On each topic, he has also designed 8 - 10 questions, both in English and Chinese, for students to dig deep into the topics.

The parents told Zhen that they appreciate this opportunity for their children. Students also enjoy this precious opportunity to speak Chinese. Some report that they speak more Chinese in those 45 minutes than they do the whole rest of the week!