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Ralph Jennings

At the Goodtime Chinese School in the Bethany suburb of Portland, Oregon, an American child stops school director Zhou Yanzhuo, of China, in the hallway to ask a question in English. She requests that he speak in Chinese and the third grader, who has no Chinese heritage, handily switches languages.
The child is one of several dozen students attending rigorous summer classes for Chinese language instruction at an age when experts believe language acquisition is easiest.
While American universities report that Chinese language enrolment is flat, Chinese language immersion courses at the K-12 level are growing. The families of students without Chinese backgrounds cite long-term professional value or a chance to sharpen overall ability to learn languages as their motivations for enrolment.
“Chinese is a major language, meaning that it’s an advantage to their children’s future development,” said Shu Bingyi, Zhou’s husband and founder of the school, a K-5 campus that charges US$14,000 per year for full-time immersion classes.
The couple said more than half of their current cohort of 100 kindergarteners have no Chinese background, a record for the school.
The number of Chinese language immersion schools for students between kindergarten and high school reached a record this year since the first one opened in 1981, and that there were now 397 across the US, according to Elizabeth Weise, who runs a blog for parents of children in Chinese language immersion instruction.

Weise said that though Chinese had lost favour in the US over geopolitical tensions, families still see studying the language, which is complex for native English speakers, as a way to sharpen learning skills.
“Relations between China and the US are not great, but they will get better,” Weise said.
Chinese immersion schools in the US initially gained popularity in the 1980s after funding was provided by the US government, following the normalisation of US-China relations in the 1970s.
The schools recaptured that popularity in the early 2000s when Chinese language was a “hot” teaching subject across the globe, said Cornelius Kubler, a professor of Asian studies at Williams College in Massachusetts.
This year, universities surveyed by the South China Morning Post reported either minimal change or a decline in enrolment in the language. The University of Alaska Fairbanks noted a drop in Chinese enrolment since 2022. Reed College in Portland said enrolment in introductory Chinese language courses had been “basically static” since 2023.
At Cornell University, Chinese had remained the third most popular language after Spanish and French for the past two years, said Liu Rui, a teaching professor in the university’s Asian studies department.

“I’ve asked the parents and they say China’s economy is getting stronger, so studying the language means more opportunities,” said Zhou, the school director, on a busy morning at the campus earlier this month.
Some educators believe that immersion schools are over-concentrated at the primary school level. They say middle and high school students may forget the Chinese language they learned as younger children.
Heritage schools, which hold weekend or after-school programmes and were originally designed for American-born Chinese, may fill the gap.
Parents may consider high school Chinese language education after their children take the language in kindergarten and primary school, said Wendy Zhen, interim principal at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association.
“Some parents think about the future,” she said, and plan for their children to take the AP Chinese Language and Culture Exam in high school.
For Nilanjan Narayan, 18, who graduated from high school this year after attending several heritage Chinese schools in California from age 2 to 18, he considers himself extra prepared to major in global studies at the University of California, Los Angeles from this fall. Born in the US to Indian parents, Nilanjan is fluent in Chinese and credits the immersion schools.
“They would help me a lot because they knew no one was speaking Chinese with me at home,” he recalled. “If I asked, they’d give me extra review time.”


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While college enrolment in Chinese stalls, K-12 immersion schools are seeing renewed popularity as parents seek advantages for their children


While college enrolment in Chinese stalls, K-12 immersion schools are seeing renewed popularity as parents seek advantages for their children.


US K-12 immersion schools expand across country for early-age Chinese language education

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}While college enrolment in Chinese stalls, K-12 immersion schools are seeing renewed popularity as parents seek advantages for their children

While college enrolment in Chinese stalls, K-12 immersion schools are seeing renewed popularity as parents seek advantages for their children