Sixty students from Seattle high schools finished up a tough, three-week summer-school language program last Friday, Aug. 22, at Seattle University. The program was tough because students in the daylong classes were only allowed to speak either Mandarin Chinese or Arabic. And the total-immersion approach was part of a broader effort by OneWorld Now! to introduce students of color and low-income students to the rarely taught but widely spoken languages, according to Kristin Hayden, the founder and executive director of the program.MULTICULTURAL LEADERSHIP SKILLSNow entering its seventh year, OneWorld Now! also includes after-school language classes in Chinese and Arabic during the school year - as well as leadership classes - for students from Cleveland, Franklin, Garfield, Ingraham, Rainier Beach and Roosevelt high schools.The leadership classes focus on developing more effective leadership skills in a multicultural world, cultivating the next generation of global leaders and taking action "to make the world a better place," Hayden said.Yet another component of OneWorld is offering students the chance to study abroad for a month in China, Morocco or Egypt, Hayden said. Scholarships are available, but not all of the program's students take part, she said.Still, studying abroad is important, Hayden believes. "Less than 1 percent of high school students study abroad," she said, adding that just a fraction of that 1 percent is made up of low-income students and students of color.Ingraham student Catherine Hennig took the emersion Chinese class this summer after spending a month in Beijing, she said. The stay in the Chinese capital helped her speaking skills, Hennig added: "I can hold a dialogue long enough to have a conversation."Now entering her third year of Chinese studies, Hennig welcomes the opportunity. "I'm very happy because I was adopted from China when I was 7," she said, "and I forgot my language."The Ingraham student admitted, however, that she still translates in her head instead of thinking in Chinese, which happens when the speaker is fluent in the language.Written Chinese is a different matter. "I still have a hard time," said Hennig, who estimates she can recognize 200 to 300 separate characters. "I can write a short story with really basic words."Sun Burford, who teaches intermediate Chinese for OneWorld, said her students often can recognize 500 to 1,000 individual characters - and sometime more. It takes knowing around 3,000 characters to be able to read a newspaper, and college-level students need to know 4,000 to 5,000 characters, she said. OneWorld students also can recognize some characters that they don't necessarily know how to write, sometimes by placing them in the context of a sentence, Burford added.Learning to speak Chinese is no easy task, either, because it's a tonal language in which one word can be spoken four different ways to mean four different things. "My students are pretty good at speaking," she said, adding there are tonal parallels in English. Making "What?" a question uses the same kind of rising tone used in Chinese, Burford said of one example.CULTURAL VALUEGarfield student Fatihah Jacob, who was studying Arabic in the emersion program, said there were two reasons she is doing that. "One reason is, I'm Muslim," she said, explaining that learning Arabic would allow her to read the Koran in its original form. "I'm also taking it because it's really beautiful language."Jacob also took part in OneWorld's study abroad program by spending a month in Rabat, Morocco. "I really want to study abroad again," she said, smiling.Jacob concedes that she speaks Arabic with some limitations. "I think I can get around with certain subjects," she said of the most widely spoken language in the world. "I think I'm better with the written part."Ahmed Mustafa, a OneWorld Arabic teacher from Cairo, said his students are very receptive to the language: "They are picking it up pretty well."The spoken part is just like any other spoken language," Mustafa said, mentioning one exception. Some of the sounds such as glottal stops take some work to master.Written Arabic is a bit more complex. The language has an alphabet but dots above and below the letter forms can change the letters, he said. "About 1,000 years ago, there were no dots," said Mustafa, who explained that readers back then figured out what the letters were supposed to be by placing them into the context of the sentence.Mustafa said he sees a cultural value beyond just language skills in the OneWorld program:"If you want to cooperate with other countries, it's important to know how they think."A SUCCESSFUL PROGRAMFunded in part by Starbuck Coffee and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, OneWorld Now! has an annual budget of around $500,000, and about 100 students take part in the program each year, executive director Hayden said. The effect on the program's students is profound, she believes. "We see huge transformations," Hayden said. "That's what's so exciting."And in another measure of success for OneWorld Now!, all of its students go on to college, "which is really significant," she said.For more information or to make a donation, log on to www.oneworldnow.org.Russ Zabel can be reached at rzabel@nwlink.com or 461-1309.[[In-content Ad]]
