The International School of Tucson is considering opening new entry-level Junior School Chinese and Spanish classes for 2012/2013. These “ab initio” classes would cater to students with little or no prior exposure to the language(s) and would also suit students transferring to IST from other schools.

“IST typically cannot accept transfer students, or students wishing to enrol having previously attended another school, after Kindergarten as they do not have the language background we require,” said Mr Robert Young, Head of School. “Ab initio classes are aimed at those students as no language background is required.”

“Transfer students who already speak or write two languages can enter our regular classes as always,” he said. “We are considering Spanish because of its importance in the US and Chinese because of its importance n the world.”

IST has previously looked at opening programmes in Arabic, Farsi, Greek, Hindi, Korean and Russian. “We are still interested in all of these languages,” said Mr Young, “however we need minimum numbers to proceed.”

The ab initio Chinese and Spanish classes would be mixed J1 / J2 groups for ages 5 – 8. Half a day would be taught in Chinese or Spanish, following the school’s regular timetable and programme structure. Students would still have Music, Physical Education, Field Trips, Visiting Speakers and so on.

Students would then join a regular English class for the other half of the day, and would of course be able to participate in IST’s wide range of extra-curricular activities. IST holds regional and state scholastic Chess titles, has just won a citywide Basketball title and has won titles in each of the regional Science and Engineering Fairs it has entered.

Ab initio classes use the same Unit Titles as regular classes however, instead of following the usual IST curriculum, they have a much more explicit language-acquisition focus. For example, while studying “My Healthy Body”, ab initio students focus on related vocabulary and derived grammatical structures rather than investigating what it is that makes a body healthy.

In terms of IST’s language programme, ab initio classes follow an “Language B” approach; the goal is to enable students to acquire sufficient language skills to be able to enter a regular class in one or two years.

Opening ab initio Chinese or Spanish requires a minimum enrolment of students new to IST. Parents interested in learning more about the possibility of enrolling their child(ren) in ab initio Chinese or Spanish are urged to contact the school.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2011 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Press Releases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.