trevordayschool

In the fall of 2017, Trevor offered its first Mandarin class, joining French and Spanish as a world language choice for 6th-grade Middle School students and 9th-grade Upper School students. Enrollment was so high that two Mandarin sections immediately filled up. Every year since, the next level class has been added. Today, there are three levels in Middle School and four levels in Upper School. ose students who first studied Mandarin with Ms. Hong in Middle School are now increasingly fluent as they undertake their fifth year of study. Ms. Hong developed the curricululm for the Middle and Upper Schools and she now teaches Mandarin for 9th–12th graders. (In 2020, Ms. Burgoyne joined Trevor to teach the Middle School sections.) What motivates students to want to learn Mandarin? e reasons are multi-faceted: Ms. Hong reports that many students want to learn more about China— both its culture and language, given its ever-increasing importance on the world stage, with some Upper School students expressing an interest in traveling or studying abroad in China. e most practical response: Many students recognize that becoming bilingual may offer them future career opportunities. (Mandarin is spoken by nearly 12 percent of the world's population and is second only to English as the most spoken language.) Another strong motivation is more personal: Students with Chinese backgrounds want to learn more deeply about their heritage, or that of close Chinese friends. Native English speakers face two major challenges when they attempt to learn Mandarin: the use of pictograms in place of letters and tonality. Chinese has no alphabet; rather, every word is its own pictogram, or character. A fluent speaker will eventually master more than 50,000 characters, though the reading of a newspaper Embracing a language that "sings" and is—at least initially—completely unrecognizable takes courage. Every year, in increasing numbers, Trevor students face the challenge and succeed. ey learn about the world and themselves, in equal measure. T R E V O R T R A N S L AT E S : upper school Mandarin by Xiaomo Hong, Grades 9–12 Mandarin Teacher as told to Diane Quinn, Director of Publications 2 0 T R E V O R D AY S C H O O L n W I N T E R 2 0 2 1 – 2 0 2 2 might typically require an understanding of some 4,000. Despite this inherent difference and difficulty, Ms. Hong notes that students are strongly attracted to the aesthetics of Chinese writing. With obvious pride, she claims that "Trevor students love writing calligraphy using Chinese brush and ink." In addition, English is a non-tonal language; Mandarin, conversely, utilizes four tones: flat, rising, falling then rising, and falling. How readily do English speakers adapt to this characteristic? Ms. Hong concedes that "It's not easy for a native English speaker to speak Chinese tones. Students need a lot of practice and listening exercises. Learning the Chinese phonetic ('Pinyin') system is the first part of our Mandarin curriculum. It is essential to build a strong foundation for beginners." Given the need for tonality, one might expect singing to be even harder than speaking, but Ms. Hong debunks that perception, explaining "Singing is not as difficult as speaking, because the melodies actually help with adapting the tones." Both in the Middle and Upper schools, students do a lot of singing activities:

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