The Department of Modern Languages hosted the fourth Chinese Immersion Day on January 26, 2017 in the Student Union Apollo Room. Chinese Instructors, Haili Du and Maan Broadstock, organized the immersion experience for around 110 high and middle school students with at least one year of Chinese language instruction.
Together, we celebrated the Year of the Rooster and helped students deepen their knowledge of the Chinese language and culture. The students and their teachers represented five schools: Bishop Ready HS; Dayton Regional STEM School; Miami Valley Middle School; Piqua HS and Springfield HS.
Dr. Marie Hertzler, Chair of the Department of Modern Languages, welcomed the students with the authentic greeting phrase in Chinese: “Chi le ma?”(Have you eaten breakfast?) instead of the standard Good morning! The students were surprised but happily responded. She mentioned the support of the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts who knows the importance of learning languages. She encouraged the students to dive into the adventure for the next three hours as a speaker of Chinese Mandarin. Following the Chair’s remarks, Modern Language alumna and 2014 Chinese minor outstanding senior Miss Ashley Binns talked to the audience in Chinese about her own experience learning the language at Wright State University. She pointed out that learning Chinese was not easy, but assured the students that great opportunities and bright futures were ahead of them. Ashley is going to take an English teaching position in a university in Beijing this spring.
After pledging to only speak Chinese throughout the day, the students participated in four breakout sessions. In the Chinese Knotting session, students learned to make a Chinese traditional decorative knot with colorful silky thread for holidays and special occasions. This handcraft making can be traced back over 1,000 years ago. At the Building Sentence session, students performed activities including recognizing characters by adding different radicles to different words to come up with new characters. Students also used the characters to make additional phrases which expanded to complete sentences. In the Catching Phrases session, students played a game taking turns picking up cards with a character or a phrase on it. The student with the card made his/her teammates guess the word or phrase on the card using verbal clues or body movements. This year the students got the opportunity to learn a dance – Ice Age Dance with Chinese lyrics and light, cheerful music led by Chinese instructor Lily Chen from Dayton Regional STEM School and Lee Huntsberger, student worker from Department of Modern Language. Lunch was provided by Tsao’s Cuisine Fairborn, a local Chinese restaurant. The meal included prosperity dumplings, longevity noodles, with chicken or tofu.
Immediately after the Chinese Immersion Day, over 400 local students and visitors came to the Apollo Room to celebrate the Lunar New Year hosted by the Asian/Native American Center (ANA). The students from the Dayton Regional STEM School and Miami Valley School gave enthusiastic dances and martial art performances on the stage. Everyone truly enjoyed the magnificent Chinese magician performance by Ms. Ying Li and Face Changing performance by Mr. Chengdu Li and had a great time visiting different cultural booths.
The fifth annual Chinese Immersion Day will take place on Thursday, February 15, 2018.
