By 8th grade, all the kids at this unique N.J. school are fluent in Mandarin – NJ.com

Editor’s note: This piece is part of Communities of New Jersey, a new series meant to highlight, showcase and cover communities underserved by large media organizations like NJ.com.

“Shēng rì kuài lè, Shēng rì kuài lè,” a chorus of about 20 elementary and middle school age students sang in Mandarin. They were lined up in the hallway of the YingHua International School on a recent weekday, holding candles. Chinese lanterns hung above as kids fidgeted around, eyeing an ice cream cake frustratingly out of reach.

The children were celebrating the 14th anniversary of the private Chinese immersion school’s opening on May 4, 2007.

Inside the small building on Laurel Avenue in Kingston, teachers lead classes from pre-school to Kindergarten entirely in Mandarin. Colorful posters describing regular morning routines— putting backpacks and jackets away, grabbing a seat, taking out pencils— are all written in Chinese characters, and all discussions are led in the language. Then, from 1st to 8th grades, the curriculum is taught partially in English and partially in Mandarin.

More than 920 million people across the world speak Mandarin as their first language, so the students at Yinghua International School have a leg up, said Wen-Lin Su, interim head of the school and director of academics. Studies have shown students who learn a second language score higher on standardized tests, have enhanced cognitive development and are more culturally aware.

“They pick up the language through a lot of daily activities,” Su said. “Teaching the language at Yinghua is not decided as, ‘I am teaching you the language.’ It’s more of it’s naturally incorporated into their activities. It’s not learning and language, it’s learning through a language… It’s built in, so the kids can absorb it faster and use it instantly.”

Yinghua, which translates to “Chinese English,” has 88 students, though the coronavirus pandemic hurt enrollment. Admission costs range from $11,225 to $24,474 depending on the grade, and financial aid is available to families in need of it.

Jennifer Rexford, of Princeton, enrolled her daughter in the school when she was two-years-old. She wanted her child to learn another language, an opportunity she never had herself growing up in South Korea with her father, who was stationed there with the U.S. military as a Korean linguist.

“I certainly grew up in an environment where I had a lot of interest in Asian culture and cuisine and art. I grew up embedded in that, but unable to communicate,” she said.

Now, Rexford says, she is shocked by her kid’s language skills. The two went on a trip to China before the coronavirus pandemic, and Rexford said her daughter spoke to locals and ordered food at restaurants with ease.

Burgess Ekman, an English and social studies teacher, says she sees a richness in her bilingual students’ writing. Mandarin is among the most difficult language for English speakers to learn because it does not use the Latin alphabet.

“Those students who are exposed to more languages, they have more lenses through which to look at problems, to break problems down, to solve problems, to approach their peers… They have more tools in their brains. They can think differently about life and anything they encounter. And there’s a richness to that that you see in their writing and their thinking. It’s lovely to see,” Ekman said.

Beyond language, the school fosters an open-mindedness of different cultures and diversity, Cheah said.

The school follows the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, a globally-focused curriculum which was developed at an academy in Switzerland in 1968 and now offered at some educational institutions in the U.S. Yinghua International is one of three Chinese immersion schools in the northeast that also offers the IB program.

Discussions are often guided by student questions, and 21st-century problems and their solutions are the focus of “units of inquiry,” which include topics like sustainability, sharing the planet and family history, school officials said. There’s freedom for students to explore their own interests, said May Jean Cheah, who teaches 4th through 8th grade science.

“What the teachers try to do is provoke (the students). IB as a framework really emphasizes the students driving the unit. Sure, the teachers have a plan, but we give space for the children to guide the unit as well,” said Cheah, who enrolled her own children in the school when she started teaching there years ago.

Unique field trips allow students to connect academics to the real world, said Emma Nelson, head of the English department. As part of an exercise on the farm-to-table movement, she said, 1st grade students go on an annual field trip to a farm where they pick vegetables then head to a local Princeton restaurant to watch the food be prepared.

At the end of 5th grade, there’s an “exhibition project” where students research an issue that interests them and develop a “cause of action” to address that issue. This year’s topics include space exploration, racial tensions in the U.S., climate change and how sports bring people together, Nelson said. In past years, students have raised money through bake sales and food drives as a campaign to address their issue.

“That’s what we build them up to do. We show them in pre-school through 5th grade that your questions can lead to things. Your inquiries, what you’re passionate about drives it,” she said. “It’s 100% student-led… This brings it all together.”

Lisa Browne, of Somerset, said wanting her children to be multi-lingual is what drove her to enroll her son at nine-months-old in the school’s daycare, but she later discovered the benefits of the IB program too. (Her kids also can communicate in Spanish, French and one of the many dialects of the Caribbean).

From learning Mandarin, her kids have grown more confident and independent, she said.

“Initially I was thinking foreign language learning,” she said. “But I think the ability to go between different types of languages, you gain more facility the more you embed yourself in that kind of discipline… It all has to do with that neurological interconnectivity and forging these pathways.”

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Avalon Zoppo may be reached at azoppo2@njadvancemedia.com. Michael Mancuso may be reached at mmancuso@njadvancemedia.com.